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A long time ago, on a continent far, far away…

Hunter-Gatherers spread out from Africa and settled the world; their linguistic and social abilities, along with their ability throw weapons, and a general ability to adapt to new environments, allowed for humans to survive and thrive in just about every ecological region on the planet. Then, climate change forced some of those hunter-gatherer tribes to look for stable food supplies, and in the areas where the geography was favorable, this led to the cultivation of cereal crops and the domestication of animals. By proxy, animals gave humans diseases, and this began a process of disease evolution with the human immune system.

Farming led to food surpluses, and this allowed for some people in society to specialize in activities like fighting wars, priesting, and working to solve the problems that civilization itself created. Those problems, like how to map out farms, create irrigation canals, deal with sewage, or build monumental architecture, forced humans to think in novel ways and create writing and mathematics. The human brain is pre-adapted for civilization in the same way that feathers which were used for warmth are pre-adapted for flying, and the new challenges of civilization rewired the hunter-gatherer brain.

This process first began in various regions, and in isolation, until technology made it possible for civilizations to move, trade, fight, and synthesize. The supercontinent of Eurasia was more suitable to this process than was the supercontinent of the Americas, and so after 1492, Eurasian civilization more or less transported itself across the Atlantic into the New World. This process brought with it the horrors of disease and enslavement, but gradually scientific and intellectual progress has turned civilization itself into something that creates progress in the human condition.

Even if we recognize the drawbacks that come from having hunter gatherers live in a civilization, the general outlook is positive. Hierarchy, capitalism, and inequality must have survived this process for a reason, hierarchical control and bureaucratic rule are necessary to control large population densities and are on the right hand side of the equal (unequal?) sign that comes from this established “civilization equation.”

This narrative, which in rough outline approximates the state of the history of civilization as we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, is the focus of David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.¹ It promises to upend the conversation about civilization and its origins.

A New Dawn

The Dawn of Everything overtly backs a particular political thesis. David Graeber (1961–2020) developed his skills for analyzing ancient cultures as an anthropologist and then used these skills to provide a perspective on Western industrial life. Graeber was a politically active anarchist (he was one of the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement), meaning that he did not believe in hierarchical control and saw direct similarities between bureaucrats in Soviet society and the purposeless jobs that existed in corporations. His books on bureaucracy and “bullshit jobs” provide a theoretical construct for understanding much about capitalist economies.² This central argument—that our current political and economic structure is the inevitable result of deterministic forces that are largely outside the control of human actors—is the primary target of the Dawn of Everything.

Hierarchical systems, the old argument goes, be they capitalist, communist, or fascists, must come with civilization because no system that is decentralized, anarchic, and egalitarian could ever control all of us former hunter-gatherers trying to live together in societies with heavy population densities. To Graeber and Wengrow, such an assertion provides a false theoretical justification for modern society, but it also creates a confirmation bias among anthropologists who study ancient civilizations. It is hard to see anarchy in ancient bones and settlements if one is not looking for it. Conversely, it becomes too easy to see social stratification if one is looking for that instead. The authors write:

This book is an attempt to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative…

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step toward inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earlier cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators (p. 4).

The authors build upon this concept to do something unusual for a book of anthropology: they refer to the general synthesis of civilization conversation as the “Hobbesian model” and posit that “Rousseau’s story about how humankind descended into inequality from an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic (at least there was somewhere better to fall from), but nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering” (p. 6).

Undercutting the Hobbesian model is a way of undercutting a justification for the current hierarchical capitalist system This is a system where democratic political idealism is a distraction from the fact that most of us suffer while laboring endlessly for corporate hierarchical structures that are as oppressive to human dignity as one-party states. The authors attack the concept of “inequality” as an oppressive abstraction that cannot be, like a state or economic system, overthrown or changed. Therefore, to ask (as Jared Diamond did in Guns, Germs, and Steel³) what are the roots of inequality, or to assert (as Steven Pinker does in The Better Angels of Our Nature⁴) that inequality is not so bad if the have-nots of today have much more than the haves of the past, is to defend a system that oppresses the human spirit.

In Wollstonecraft’s theory, civilization is an extrapolation of male physical strength over women. If there is truth to that, then civilization “got stuck” in a mode that rewards masculine values over feminine values.

Francis Fukuyama, whose two-volume work on the development of civilization—The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014)⁵—reflects a conservative think tank fascination with bureaucracy, Graeber and Wengrow suggest, is just as much to blame (or credit) as Diamond is for perpetuating the myth of inevitability. After humans stopped roaming around, “Hierarchies began to emerge. There was no point in resisting, since hierarchy—according to Diamond and Fukuyama—is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization” (p. 10).

There is much in The Dawn of Everything that is typical of the “we-were-better-off-before-civilization” genre. For example, the authors quote from a famous letter written by Benjamin Franklin about how whites who were captured by Indians and lived in native society for a while were unable to return to the stultifying civilization of the whites. There is also a criticism of modern anthropologists who see all movement of objects from region to region as evidence of trade networks, rather than as evidence of quirkier aspects of human behavior like long-distance vision quests for items or gambling societies among the women.

In the Graeber-Wengrow narrative, the story after 1492 is less one of western conquest of the Americas followed by European Enlightenment, and more one about how conversations with natives led to a synthesis of ideas. Here is how the authors described it in one of the most interesting passages in the book:

If we ask, not “what are the origins of social inequality?” but “what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?” (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Academie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies: in this case, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. What’s more, a lot of those conversations make reference to arguments that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality or for that matter rationality and revealed religion indeed, most of the themes that would later become central to Enlightenment political thought (p. 30).

There are some profound consequences that come from asking “what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?” The notion being that historical narratives are shaped by the questions and concerns of historians, and those questions and concerns might be arbitrary. Asking different questions can lead to entirely different forms of history, and therefore, different conceptions of the present.

Of course, anthropology and archaeology are supposed to be sciences, not just a bunch of philosophers staring at bones and pieces of settlements and spitballing speculations about human nature. The point Graeber and Wengrow make is that too many scientists misread the evidence because they are looking for evidence of inequality to answer the question of “why inequality?”

Evidence of Institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place: after all, if any of these Ice Age “princes” had behaved like, say, Bronze Age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralized power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling “states.” To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion, we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about ‘primitive’ mentalities (p. 92).

What follows from such a statement is a vast and assorted array of evidence about how the assumptions that modern anthropologists and archaeologists, citizens of hierarchical and unequal states, simply fail to be supported by the evidence. Hierarchical organizations with private property are not inevitable results of settled farming, but anomalies. The catch is that once societies start moving in a hierarchical direction they “get stuck” on that path and can’t retreat from it. Take the case of the Calusa, a “non-agricultural people who inhabited the west coast of Florida, from Tampa Bay to the Keys” (p. 150). The Calusa, encountered by Ponce de Leon in 1513, skipped the agricultural stage and went straight to a centralized kingdom with built-in inequality.

By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed “got stuck” in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal. Confronted with such cases, adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly (p. 152).

Of course, a book that seeks to discuss and dismiss notions of inequality will by necessity have to address slavery, but the authors note how difficult the concept is to define and find when studying ancient societies. Slaves tended to be war captives, often women, and they “were an anomaly: people who were neither killed nor adopted, but who hovered somewhere in between; abruptly and violently suspended in the midpoint of a process that should normally lead from prey to pet to family” (p. 191).

To the authors’ credit, they don’t pick through evidence that only supports their claims to equality. They note that “in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. These figures are striking…they rival the demographic balance in the colonial South at the height of the cotton boom…”(p. 199). Such passages indicate that the authors’ real intent is to note that ancient societies are just too varied to draw any conclusion about notions of inequality in society. The authors seem to imply that if you want evidence for a theory, the archaeological record will supply it; just be careful to only shake a few examples out of the bag.

The Dawn of Everything is a big book, with many theories considered, but the authors give appropriate attention to Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898),⁶ an “anti-Christian” who “posited the universal existence of an early form of society ‘known as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule’, where institutions of government and religion were modelled on the relationship of mother to child in the household” (p. 215), and to archeologist Marija Gimbutas, of whom they write: “if you read the book of Gimbutas—such as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982)—you quickly realize that their author was attempting to do something which, until then, only men had been allowed to do: to craft a grand narrative for the origins of Eurasian civilization” (p. 216). That grand narrative involved a pre-historical European civilization where the people were largely peaceful and worshiped female goddesses.⁷ Neither Gage nor Gimbutas managed to penetrate the public or academic consciousness to any degree.

Archeological finds in Central Europe show “how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision making. This would have to mean that members of individual households—or at least, their neighborhood representatives—shared a conceptual framework for the settlement as a whole” (p. 295). The idea that food surpluses led to specialization and social stratification is a “compelling story. It is also quite true when applied to our present-day situation…. However, almost none of the regimes we’ve been considering in this chapter [“Why the State Has No Origin”] were actually staffed by full-time specialists” (p. 428). Priesting and fighting were seasonal activities, to be engaged in only when farming was slow.

Even the narrative of “imperialism” ecological or otherwise, the authors continue, might be better understood as a synthesis because…

we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a “government of laws and not of men.”

As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. (p. 481).

The authors intimate the possibility that Montesquieu might even have attended a political conference with the Osage and inculcated some of his ideas from them.

Finally, having presented evidence for a new history of humanity, the authors speculate as to why this new conception of human societies has gone unseen for so long. “We eventually came to realize that this reluctance to synthesize was not simply a product of reticence on the part of highly specialized scholars, although this is certainly a factor. To some degree it was simply the lack of an appropriate language. What, for instance, does one even call a ‘city lacking top-down structures of governance? At the moment there is no commonly accepted term” (p. 522).

A lack of appropriate language and symbols is very frequently a problem for relatively new fields of analysis; while anthropology and archaeology are not new, the attempt to synthesize fields, which is a requirement for this kind of thinking, is. With an understanding of this, and a basic framework for understanding The Dawn of Everything, a way to further the civilization conversation becomes clarified.

Continuing the Civilization Conversation

Questions about humanity’s interaction with civilization have attracted some of the world’s best minds, and the field of work is synthesizing into something impressive. The Dawn of Everything is unquestionably an important book, but the authors write as if they were trying to smash an existing paradigm rather than make an important contribution to the conversation; this approach limits the effect of their work because it caused them to make caricatures of important arguments, to overlook the importance of historical context beyond anthropology and archaeology, and to miss a key conclusion of their logic.

The Dawn of Everything is laced with a sarcastic wit which, while entertaining when Graeber aimed it at worthless bureaucrats and corporate lawyers in his previous book, works less well when addressing serious arguments like those made by Diamond and Pinker. This is not because the sarcasm reads badly (Graeber will forever be the smartest kid in class, sitting in the back, raising his hand to ask a sarcastic question and make the class laugh) but because the tone sometimes forces the authors into a Hegelian trap.

By attacking the accepted wisdom, the authors too often construct caricatures of the arguments put forth by other scholars, and thus end up arguing with opponents rather than conversing with colleagues. In addition to tracing the development of guns, germs, and steel, Jared Diamond wrote extensively about the native societies in Papua New Guinea,⁸ where he lived and researched for a number of years, and his 1999 article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”⁹ (the mistake being civilization), could have been foundational for Graeber and Wengrow’s argument. They break Diamond’s life’s work into straws, select just a few, and then build and burn a strawman.

The authors criticize Steven Pinker for focusing on prehistoric skeletons that show evidence of violent death, while not focusing on other forms of anthropological evidence that show the opposite. But Pinker is aware that there are prehistoric skeletons that show evidence of having been cared for just as surely as there are skeletons that show evidence of violent deaths. Pinker’s thesis deals with large-scale trends in data, not individual data points, and he has argued that already existing human impulses toward non-violent behavior have been expanded by enlightened forms of centralizing governments.

The authors gently ridicule Frances Fukuyama for his history of political order, where they might have instead found much of value in Fukuyama’s argument about how criminal organizations, like the mafia, can sometimes develop in the absence of a more centralized legitimate state. Such an insight might have been useful when applied to certain types of prehistoric evidence.

Very late in the book, Graeber and Wengrow write about the impact they believe their book will have:

No doubt, for a while at least, very little will change. Whole fields of knowledge—not to mention prestigious research grants, libraries, databases, school curricula and the like—have been designed to fit the old structures and the old questions. Max Planck one remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents eventually die…. We are optimists. We like to think it will not take that long (p. 525).

Might it be suggested that talking to other scholars who are interested in the same topic, rather than declaring them to be wrong and implying that the science might advance when they die, could help to facilitate new understandings?

There are times when Graeber and Wengrow’s background as anthropologists and archeologists seems insufficient for providing context to the historical movements they discuss. For example, on the topic of Rousseau’s essay Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality, they write:

Rousseau’s essay is undoubtedly odd. It’s also not exactly what it’s often claimed to be. Rousseau does not, in fact, argue that human society begins in a state of idyllic innocence. He argues, rather confusingly, that the first humans were essentially good, but nonetheless systematically avoided one another for fear of violence. As a result, human beings in a State of Nature were solitary creatures, which allows him to make a case that “society” itself—that is, any form of ongoing association between individuals—was necessarily a restraint on human freedom (p. 64).

Rousseau’s argument about human nature must be understood in the context of Christian history. To expand upon the authors’ metacognitive themes, we might ask “what are the origins of the question about the question of human nature?” The answer to that is unique to Christian theology. The edifice of the Catholic Church was built upon the notion of a “sinful nature” that had been bequeathed to humanity via the Garden of Eden. Humans, taught the Church, were born bad and could only be redeemed through the Seven Sacraments, aka the “good works” of the Church. In 1517, Martin Luther agreed that humans were born bad, but believed “good works” to be all but useless for salvation, because faith alone could redeem humanity.

The Christians who “discovered” Native Americans after 1492 thus were predisposed to ask questions about human nature and saw Native societies as examples of what would happen to a human population deprived of salvation, hence the assumption that native pagan rituals were evil. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, only Christians, upon encountering a New World full of people would have thought to ask a question about human nature. The Chinese Treasure Fleet (1405–1433) came into contact with “pre-civilized” groups on Indo-Pacific islands, but the question of human nature seemed not to have materialized, probably because the Confucian Chinese saw their fleet as a way of superimposing their value system (the father is the head of the household, the emperor is the head of China, and China is the head of the world) on the Indo-Pacific.

In the same way that John Locke used secular philosophy to justify a religiously motivated Glorious Revolution (1688) in England, and thus create an Enlightenment foundation for the American and French Revolutions, Rousseau was secularizing the religious concept of human nature and using it as a way to critique civilization, and to begin by stating that human nature is bad would have marked him as a theologian. This is important because as Graeber and Wengrow write:

Rousseau’s model of human society—which, he repeatedly emphasizes, is not meant to be taken literally, but is simply a thought experiment—involves three stages: a purely imaginary State of Nature, when individuals live in isolation from one another; a stage of Stone Age savagery, which followed the invention of language (in which he includes most of the modern inhabitants of North America and other actually observable “savages”); then finally, civilization, which followed the invention of agriculture and metallurgy. Each marks a moral decline. But, as Rousseau is careful to emphasize, the entire parable is a way to understand what made it possible for human beings to accept the notion of private property in the first place (p. 65)

What the authors missed is that Rousseau created an Enlightenment mythology that took the place of Christian mythology’s “Garden of Eden” with “original goodness” taking the place of “original sin.” In the same way that the Church redeemed original sin, civilization corrupted human nature. While Graeber and Wengrow asked the question of “from where did the question about the nature of inequality come from?” Again, they did not then ask “from where did the question ‘what is human nature’ originate?” It’s an equally interesting question that provides a new insight into the conversation.

Furthermore, although the authors are seeking to overturn the received anthropological and archaeological narrative, they do so by accepting the accepted “Hobbes vs. Rousseau” narrative of the Enlightenment. But, just as there are alternative ways to interpret archeological and anthropological evidence, there are also alternative ways to interpret the Enlightenment.

By building on the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage and Marija Gimbutas, one could create a narrative of civilization where hunter-gatherer societies were ruled more by feminine characteristics such as cooperation and peaceful conversation, while civilization itself has traditionally favored more masculine characteristics such as aggression and violent confrontation. Graeber’s and Wengrow’s most important contribution is to assert that civilization “got stuck” in a hierarchical mode at some point, but they did not see that there is a way of viewing the Enlightenment that provides a means to back to the cooperative matriarchal forms of politics that could have governed so many early human societies.

If we accept that civilization has been a bad deal for women, and the fact alone that seven centuries of Chinese foot-binding probably crippled about two billion women should be enough to prove the assertion, then the rise and development of feminism as an ideology should be seen as the main Enlightenment narrative. Everyone quotes Hobbes, but why not Mary Astell (1666–1731) who wrote “But the scripture commands Wives to submit themselves to their own Husbands. True; for which St. Paul gives a Mystical Reason (Eph. V. 22 & c) and St. Peter a Prudential and Charitable one (I Pet. Iii), but neither of them derive that Subjection from the Law of Nature (p. 564).

This may be the single most important sentence that anyone ever wrote. Astell is saying “The Bible says you can oppress women, but how does this Enlightenment concept of the Law of Nature justify it?” Rousseau answered in his 1762 novel, Emile by saying “When women become strong, men become still stronger; when men become soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio remains unaltered.”¹⁰ In other words, the Law of Nature justifies the subjugation of women because boys are stronger than girls.

Graeber and Wengrow don’t cite Mary Wollstonecraft, probably because she only features in the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment as an early women’s rights advocate, but Wollstonecraft arguably had more of value to say about civilization than either Rousseau or Hobbes. In her masterpiece, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she wrote:

In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man.¹¹

In Wollstonecraft’s theory, civilization is an extrapolation of male physical strength over women. If there is truth to that, then civilization “got stuck” in a mode that rewards masculine values over feminine values and if that is the case then we might need a new narrative, one where the Protestant Reformation, Western Literature, the Enlightenment, and western science (being the giver of the birth control pill) are resynthesized to see how feminism emerged. Feminism, then, would be the means of rebirthing the more egalitarian societies that Graeber and Wengrow draw attention to.¹² Redirecting the civilization conversation requires taking the same kind of approach to history and philosophy that Graeber and Wengrow have taken to anthropology and archaeology.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 27.1
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Accepting this, we then have questions that need answered. For example, men and women show a great degree of sexual dimorphism, with men possessing about 80 percent more upper body strength than women. What this indicates about our prehistoric past is not as important as the questions it raises about the present: Is sexual dimorphism incompatible with civilization? If so, should we try to solve this incompatibility biologically like we solved the problem of excessive women’s pregnancies? Should our culture accentuate aggressive male behavior through competitive sports, aggressive policing practices, and hierarchical corporate culture? Or should we encourage cooperative activities, counseling and support systems, and more egalitarian forms of decision making and resource allocation?

Graeber’s and Wengrow’s thesis can be described as such: early civilizations were like large and varied cooperative conversations. All of them, in time, came to be dominated by the same type of boorish and intimidating figure who shouts so loudly about how his presence is inevitable that no one else can get a word in. This is an important contribution, and it raises the possibility that, if we can rethink early civilizations and create new pathways of understanding through history, we might be able to conceptualize a future where human civilization returns to the more cooperate, peaceful, and egalitarian roots. If civilization has forced us to be ruled by masculine virtues, then maybe we can redirect ourselves to a new dawn of everything, one that is ruled by the more feminine characteristics of cooperation and egalitarianism; we just need to keep the civilization conversation going until we find a theoretical understanding that allows us to get unstuck.

Graeber and Wengrow have not overturned an existing paradigm, but they have provided an important contribution to what may be humanity’s most important conversation about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.