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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.  David Graeber and David Wengrow.  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.  NY. 2021.

Hard Cover.  Sewn and glued.  List of Maps and Figures; Notes; Bibliography.  692 pages.  2 lbs.

Found at Eureka Springs Carnegie Library; purchased at Alibris.com.

The Dawn of Everything is non-fiction; but the story it tells shatters the myths we have been using since The Enlightenment to explain the current human condition.

Spoiler alert!  I’m about to quote the last paragraph of the book, which I consider right now to be on par with Darwin’s famous last paragraph in On The Origin of Species:

“We can see more clearly now what is going on when…a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society; that its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. 

We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.”

Today, as I write this, the world seems fraught with anxiety: war in Ukraine, impending climate change made more real with every record-breaking summer, and the rise of autocracy and theocracy even within our own cherished democracy.

But we’re telling ourselves myths when we believe these issues arise because we are stuck in some narrative that is inescapable.  In my opinion, now more than ever we must embrace the lessons The Dawn of Everything attempts to impart.

What an audacious title: The Dawn of Everything.  The authors don’t refer to this phrase until the last concluding chapter, and in reading the book I often wondered why they used this title.  It comes from Mircea Eliade, a historian of human religion, who wrote that traditional societies regard current events in relation to historical myth, whereas most modern societies regard current events in relation to future-based myths of last days, judgement, or redemption. 

For traditional societies, ‘the dawn of everything’ is their mythic beginning, the explanation for who they are as a people and how they came to be.  This mythos informs and explains everything happening now.  The now is explained from the past.

Modern humans have our own mythos whenever we approach human history as though it were linearly progressing, coming from either innocence or violence and culminating in our current civilization that either compromises that innocence or holds back our natural violent tendencies.  This mythos informs and explains everything happening now; the now is further justified for the future.

The authors further expand on this idea: for a traditional culture, what happened yesterday or in a grandparent’s day can only be explained and understood in the storytelling of their culture’s myths.  For example, a person’s heroic action can only be the repeat of some mythological founder’s action.

For modern cultures, what happened yesterday or in a grandparent’s day can only be explained or understood in the storytelling of our culture’s myths.  For example, a person’s heroic action can only be an example of how our culture as a whole is progressing and a part of a grand narrative heading towards some inevitable end.

Both explanations constrain our understanding of what is; they give us a construct to hang our hat on but do not necessarily present the truth of now, whenever that ‘now’ might be.

The authors subtitle furthers the idea: “A New History of Humanity.” 

The main contention of Graeber and Wengrow is that we have not been stuck in our past and neither are we bound to some inevitable future.  They give a new interpretation of humanity’s history.  They give me a historian’s hope that our current situation will not stay stuck and that we will actively create our own future.

The authors have woven together the emerging strands of anthropological and archeological knowledge we’ve gained in the past few decades into a coherent picture of human social structure—and shows it to be one of adaptation, not stagnation or progression. 

Let’s take a quick tour on how the authors get to this refreshing outlook by using their last paragraph as a guide:

Historical studies can be rigorous in their research and astute in their conclusions, but still limited because of certain assumptions they make.  Graeber and Wengrow offer a critique of Steven Pinker, including his book Enlightenment Now, which restricts itself by its worship of the Age of Enlightenment as a strictly European invention and its damnation of anything ‘traditional.’  This is similar to my concerns with David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity.

So many authors look at humanity’s broad sweep of history by starting with certain assumptions that Graeber and Wengrow systematically show to be mistaken.

Thanks in large part to the popularity in Western thought of both Rousseau and Hobbes, we now have an automatic assumption that ancient and tradition-based humans were either innocent naives incapable of political decision or were violent savages immune to deep political discussion.

Further Western-based assumptions declare that those innocents or savages could only be brought into the realm of political discourse once they learned to farm, then congregated into cities, and then further progressed into civilizations.  This myth directly guided the United States’ forced assimilation of Native Americans.

The assumptions continue: the great tragedy of civilization is that we must give up certain freedoms in order to benefit from having arts, advanced technology, bureaucratic efficiency, and safety.  Specifically, we must sacrifice the freedom of full participatory democracy.

Do you remember reading human history in which the story goes like this: after the ice age the agricultural revolution happened, cities formed, and civilization emerged?  Well, that was a 10,000-plus year process.

Drill down to the details and we see that there was no ‘agricultural revolution’; humans learned to farm slowly, over not just generations but millennia.  And cities didn’t bloom like mushrooms after the rain; they slowly grew from congregated groups of humans over millennia—all across the globe.  And civilizations did not require a foreswearing of individual freedoms; there were cities around the world before The Enlightenment with tens and hundreds of thousands of individuals who had freedom of movement, freedom to disobey, and freedom to recreate their political structure.

Understand, too, that some of those pre-city human groups and some of those pre-Enlightenment cities did have structures of strict hierarchy and lost freedoms.  It is the authors’ point that there is no single narrative to our human past.  We had adapted our societies around the world and across time to a whole spectrum of possible social structures.

They hesitate to predict the future; it seems likely there will not be any predetermined narrative to our future as well.  But I will venture some hypotheses about the future, based on what they write about our past:

Are we so beholden to past myths of tradition or to future myths of redemption that today we must be chained between only liberal democracy or autocracy?

Will we adapt to climate change consciously or blindly?

Will it be a collective consciousness that expands the most good for the most people for most of the time?  That can be our hope, but it is not our inevitability.  We could just as easily consciously adapt to climate change by turning to strong men running authoritarian regimes or to theocracies.

And will we use the technologies we already have available, such as nuclear energy, while creating new technologies?  Or will we go forward with blind faith in some mythological future?

The above dichotomies about our future are false, based on my reading of this book.  Graeber and Wengrow tell a different story from most any other historians I’ve read, a much-needed story for today’s environment.

“Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity—as moral and social beings—to negotiate between such alternatives.”  (p. 118)  They make this statement after asking the typical questions about our past; I ask them about our future. 

What makes us human is the ability to negotiate the whole spectrum of options between our traps of false dichotomies.

The breath of fresh air I feel when reading The Dawn of Everything is the realization that humans have created and re-created their social realities over, and over, in every geographical location and time.

Our ancestors across the globe were not stuck in a mythos of history nor in a mythos of future redemption.

They repeatedly, cyclically, seasonally, generationally recreated their societies.

The only inevitability is that humans as a group will experiment with how to be a group.

If I can’t change that myth of beginnings, change the story of futures, and reinterpret what is happening now, then I’m stuck in a narrative that is disempowering, deterministic, or hopeless.  War, ignored climate change, or rising theocracies or autocracies are not inevitable, but certainly within the spectrum of options.

The narratives that I read about what humans have done, are doing, are capable of doing, where we came from, where we’re headed—all influence what I think to myself, say, and do with my body.

What I do with my body is heavily influenced by the ideas I have in my mind.  Let me have this idea: that just as humans have in the past, so we can and will adapt into the future, actively and decisively.

This is a large book, written by an anthropologist and an archeologist as a historical narrative.  It is full of supporting details and 150 pages of footnotes and bibliography.  I suggest going to your local library, pulling The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity off the shelf, and reading the first and concluding chapters.

If you’re still hooked, then you can wade into the full text; but in the very least you will have a deeper understanding of their thesis and supporting facts, and how rigorous they’ve been to present their argument by questioning the usual assumptions about human history.

Then go forth with a new mythos: one of empowerment.  We always have and therefore always will experiment with how to be a group of humans, no matter the current situation.

Other posts that mention this review: Essay based on The Science of Storytelling