The Dawn of Everything is very deeply thought-provoking. I have previously read Debt and not thought much of it and then I couldn't even get through Bullshit Jobs, but this is the David Graeber book that has really hooked me. My dad and grandpa both read it and talked about it and my grandpa bought it for me, but they honestly undersold it. The Dawn of Everything is just a fantastic book of cultural anthropology that draws conclusions about the state and anarchy that force you to really think. I feel like this is the kind of book that will keep people arguing for years and years because of how absolutely different the perspective is that Graeber and Wengrow write from. It took me a while to figure out what the book is really about. There are several themes that seem disconnected: an argument that the agricultural "revolution" was actually a slower and less dramatic process, emphasis on different groups observing different ways of life and consciously rejecting them, and a diversity of ways to live. But especially after having just read Karl Popper the message of the Davids in this book is clear: the state is a creation of the aristocracy and it is predatory. This is going a lot further than Popper, who sees use for the state and a battle between those who favor democracy and those who favor elitism for control of the state. The authors of Dawn, in contrast, argue that over the last 12,000 years of human history, there have been countless ways for people to organize themselves, but that we have gotten stuck in a form of government that is overly centralized, overly controlled by elites, and overly unequal. My notes on the book are more sporadic than usual, but I've got some takeaways.
In chapter five, titled, "Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Canadian neighbors didn't; or, the problem with 'modes of production,'" the authors do an amazing analysis of why societies adopt slavery. They point out that the economic use of slavery is that "a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being." That is why the "archetypal slaves are war captives." Raising slaves is a lot of work, especially in a time when many people didn't live to adulthood. That makes American slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries so unusual. However, it makes sense then that banning the slave trade in 1807 could have had a role in causing the end of slavery by making it economical had the cotton gin not been invented. On modes of production, the authors point out that slave societies seemingly produce nothing while their slaves do everything for them. But really they should be thought of as just another extreme form of a hierarchical society. The society uses its extreme inequality to produce a class of warriors, priests, and nobility, all of whom can afford not to do the primary work of raising crops or other survival needs because they have slaves to do it for them. But the authors point out that the primary purpose of slaves is not even to raise crops, but to first provide for domestic care needs, something that inequalities create again today in maids and nannies. I think this raises questions, however, about what the pros and cons of hierarchical and equalitarian societies are. If we accept that inequality is necessary to produce non-agricultural workers, does that apply today to our doctors, journalists, scientists, and other jobs? Are we saying that inequality creates progress? Because that doesn't feel right. If it is, then we need to strike a balance between progress and the distribution of the fruits of progress.
The discussion of inequality reminded me a lot of Popper's criticism of Plato in the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies. In Dawn, the authors focus on schismogenesis, the idea that societies and cultures form and self-differentiate by looking at their neighbors and deciding they don't like what they see. So there is a natural formation of equal and unequal societies side-by-side. Popper did lots of analysis of how Plato looked with envy on the highly unequal Spartan society compared to his own Athens. In both books, there is a lot of talk of the people living in equalitarian societies looking at the aristocratic barbarians on their borders and feeling an inferiority complex. They weren't wrong. Eventually, those barbarian kings would take over the whole world, instituting feudalism everywhere before bourgeoise capitalists rose up to replace them hundreds or thousands of years later. But even today, in modern American society, we idolize fantasies of aristocratic barbarians in our culture. We love people who are lawless, seen in our Westerns and Viking films, and we even more love the lawless who have a birthright whether of the aristocratic form in Game of Thrones or the genetic superiority of our superheroes, who act outside the law as well. It seems like we are at the end of an age of autocrats that would have begun around the time of the first kingdoms and empires in the middle east some 3,000 years ago and come to their end from the year 1776/89 to today. But are we in the last breaths of the age of autocracy in which political power went to autocrats, or just a brief respite from its continued existence? I guess we won't know for another 1,000 years. What this book says is certain is that people were much more free before agriculture and that they were actively rejecting it because of the debts it would create and the inequality that would follow when one farmer had surplus and others did not, or when on farmer held the good land and other did not.
In chapters 6 and 7, titled, "Gardens of Adonis: The revolution that never happened: hoe Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture" and "The Ecology of Freedom: How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world," the authors argue that there was no agricultural revolution. Instead, they argue that many people developed light forms of agriculture that let nature do the work, like scattering seeds on a floodbank of a river, so they wouldn't have to irrigate. One example they use is wheat. When wild wheat ripens, its connection between the spikelet (carrying the seed that we use in bread) and the stem breaks, dropping the seeds on the ground. In domesticated wheat, the plant has evolved to require a human to remove the spikelet. The authors argue that this shows that the domestication of wheat came not from use for bread, which would have required separating the seeds at the time of ripeness, but for use as straw, which would have meant taking the entire stalk before the seed would drop, eliminating the need for dropping. Their argument is extended to politics, as they deny the scholarly consensus that the agricultural revolution was the impetus to state development, writing that no society "followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation."
Graeber and Wengrow identify three principles that form the possible bases of social power: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. They illustrate the bases by the example of Kim Kardashian, walking around the streets with valuable jewelry. She is able to keep her jewelry safe from theft, most obviously, because the state threatens violence and incarceration against those who would steal from her. If not the state, she may have her own bodyguards who could harm those who try to steal from her. But what if there was no ability to harm others? What if we were all invulnerable to the injuries that others could do to us? Then she would need to control information, and lock her diamonds up in a safe that only she knew the code to. And if we lived in a world where we could all read each other's minds? Then she would need to convince everyone (since we would all know the code to her safe) that she is the rightful possessor of the diamonds and that we should just let her have them. I noticed these three principles of power contrast with Max Weber's power through law, tradition, and charisma (although they both share charisma). I want to explore that more and read Weber next. The three sources of social power above contrast with the three "primordial freedoms," which Wengow and Graeber identify as the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create and transform social relationships.
By the end of the book, I feel very aware of what Graeber and Wengrow criticize, but unconvinced by what they propose. I understand that they believe the agricultural revolution was not so much of a revolution, and that states didn't have to form in the way they did, but I am skeptical that Native American societies provide a model for what could have been. The authors point out that the western states could only expand their notion of statehood by force, but if other forms of government could not withstand that attack, isn't that a valid criticism of that form of government? While the use of force is illegitimate in the context of colonialization, that only diminishes the moral value of the traditional state, but doesn't show that another form of organization is superior. If your form of self-government cannot provide security, you lose that government, and so it is inferior. But that said, the "indigenous critique" is interesting. The authors contend throughout the book that indigenous criticism had a major effect on Western philosophy and self-reflection, as indigenous people pointed out flaws in the European way of life. But however thought-provoking, I'm not sure the effect they describe is real, and I would like to see it confirmed by other writers. But let me end by saying that above all else this book made me think, and its perspective was a fantastic jumping point for reflection.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Since the existence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago, there have only been two opportunities in which temperatures were warm enough to develop agriculture: the Eemian interglacial, some 130,000 years ago (didn't happen) and then the beginning of the Holocene, some 13-12,000 years ago, in which people did indeed develop agriculture.
- Something that I'm thinking about is how important it is that agriculture developed after the ice age in which humans crossed the Bering Strait. So those humans that went to the Americas missed out, which would have big consequences later.
- My notes on it aren't good, so I'll just say that chapter 9, "Hiding in Plain Sight: The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas" has the most interesting stuff about Teotihuacan and is worth a read by anyone.
- One reason that Inca rulers were motivated to expand their empires was that they only inherited the old ruler's army, and not his court, lands, or retainers.
- "Free" derives from a Germanic term meaning "friend," reflective of the fact that to be a slave is to be unfree, and to have no ability to form independent social relationships.
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