The Dawn of Everything (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Review)

I was in doubt whether I should read this book. Besides the enormous amount of praise it has garnered, I am aware of accusations that the authors have embellished their story by drawing conclusions from papers which those papers didn’t really support; or that the authors wanted to pursue a narrative that caused them to read between the lines a bit too much or cherrypicked a bit too much. I wouldn’t really know – I am not an anthropologist. But I remember reading Jared Diamond’s Gun, Germs and Steel (1997) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) – books that also have been criticised heavily after publication, with many scientists publishing counterarguments – and yet I am happy to have read those books. They introduced me to powerful ideas and I liked becoming aware of those ideas. And a little controversy is not bad for science. If it pushes other scientists to engage with the material and publish work to disprove those ideas, that is the basic stuff of science. Every scientific paper shouts its conclusion into the void, until someone else tries to disprove it again. That is how the field progresses. 

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything in its turn gives counterarguments to books by people such as Diamond, Harari and Pinker, and many other authors’ works. And raises new controversies that other scientists will feel compelled to gather evidence to disprove in their turn. The point is ultimately that this book introduces a wealth of new ideas that science will be engaging with in the future, and that makes it worth reading. In fact, I suspect that this book will become necessary reading if you are interested at all in following the ideas about big-picture human history.

Graeber and Wengrow originally set out to write a book about the origins of social inequality but found out that it was the wrong way to look at things. Inequality was hard to define and furthermore, it presupposes that once upon a time in prehistory, there was no inequality. The whole notion rests on a vision of human history that the Davids began to suspect was not correct. The first chapter takes a huge detour to explain this, and I didn’t find it all that easy to follow their main point here. They make a case for the idea that the European enlightenment was influenced directly by contact with other civilisations, such as China and American Indians. In the cross-influence of ideas with the American Indians, Europeans doubled down on the idea that they are superior because of technological progress, invented this hierarchy of social evolution with primitives at the bottom and themselves at the top, and saw private property as a necessary evil for technological progress. The Davids’ issue with this is that this view of history ignores that “primitive societies” are still complex societies with well-reasoning individuals who might have something to say about our own modern civilisation, and that the inequality that is part of our technological progress might not be an inevitable and necessary evil. And therefore the authors want to give us another view of history that is more hopeful about our capacity to change for the better. I think. I hope the rest of the book makes it clearer. 

My first impression is that there is a lot of “perhaps” and “not inconceivable that” and “might have been”, because the book is busy tearing down existing ideas about human history as much as presenting a possible alternative vision. For instance, there are prehistoric graves found in Europe in which the bodies are fully clothed and surrounded by jewellery, and the Davids reference these graves at least three times in quick succession: first to suggest that prehistoric cultures might have been very egalitarian because one of the bodies had dwarfism but was taken care of well by the culture in which that person lived, secondly to suggest that some cultures may have regarded unusual individuals like dwarves as prophets and gave them religiously motivated burials, and thirdly to suggest that the graves are of kings who only ruled in summer because some nomadic cultures flip their social arrangements between seasons. So we get all these possible visions for what might have been, and all of them could be true, but we can’t know because we only have some graves to look at. And the point of all these stories is simply for the authors to say that prehistoric graves with jewellery don’t automatically mean that these cultures had an unequal, hierarchical society with hereditary kings.

So, I think that this book is making a few very simple points, actually. Prehistoric cultures were neither all innocent and egalitarian, nor all tyrannically hierarchical, but were flexible and switched between arrangements. Even the advent of agriculture or the dismissal of it was a conscious choice, and didn’t change much in that flexibility. Even a clear line between nomadic existence and cities does not really exist. The new question becomes: why did we get stuck in a particular form of governance with particular ideas about freedom and personal property? 

Unfortunately, the authors made it very hard for themselves by dragging in so many stories and claims, taking huge detours, which make their thesis chaotic and vulnerable to critique. Sometimes they expound on some could-be-true proposition such as that European festivals may have their origin in a prehistorical seasonal switching between hierarchical structures, and then the next chapter they take the idea as a given and build on it further. And so they often build ideas on top of ideas from chapter to chapter, ending one chapter with a ‘might have been’ and starting the next chapter with a ‘so we concluded that’, and I’m not sure how structurally sound that is. I am perfectly willing to entertain their main points, though, but overall, it was too speculative for my taste, and a bit misleading how they built conclusions on speculations.

What I see the Davids do a lot in this book is trying to prove or suggest the absence of something, which is generally a very hard thing to do in science. I can assert that there is no teapot circling around Jupiter, but proving it is really hard. In the same vein, the authors point to prehistoric ruins that consist of huge platforms or circular cities, and say that there are no signs of aristocracy or class differences there, but I find this weak arguments. Maybe the leadership at those places didn’t express itself in monumental architecture, and who knows what all those platforms were used for. The next chapter they do the same with the city Uruk. They point at the fact that the city had a big square, which in their words is just what you would expect if the city was run by civilian assemblies, and a few lines later they take that as fact. You might say that the authors don’t try to prove anything but are merely “asking the question”, but they do transform their hypotheses into conclusions at the end of every chapter.

The authors kept drawing conclusions from very subjective interpretations in a way that made me more and more annoyed with the book, and finally made me double guess everything that they claimed. Another example concerns the ruins of a city in China. Archeology shows that the city had big walls and a palace, and at one point the population exploded, the city walls were dismantled and the palace grounds now housed trash pits and squalid houses. Sounds like overpopulation to me. The authors immediately jump to the conclusions that this was apparently an age of prosperity and that we are looking at a social reform of equality, and from there on go to claim that social revolutions might have been common in prehistory. Every chapter makes this sudden move towards conclusions that they want to read in it. 

What I got out of this book were a lot of interesting perspectives, but the thrust of their overall argument stayed hazy for me. The problem was that the book pretended to pursue a research question, but the authors admitted in the first chapter that they in fact abandoned their research question and a quarter into the book transplanted it with a new one: why did we get stuck in a particular form of society? But with many of the narrative detours and discussions about freedom and private property, I didn’t fully understood their part in the argument that was being built. They were always three detours deep from some central line of argumentation. 

I think this book on its own is not enough to be convincing of the arguments that the authors make, and will have to be supported by a lot of additional future research. Neither can it be simply dismissed. They’ve opened a lot of doors for the future. That brings me back to my own first point that it is worth reading for the new ideas it introduces to the world.