The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything is a book by an archaeologist David Wengrow and an anthropologist David Graeber who methodically dismantle the simplified view of the progress of human civilization. That we went from small bands of hunters-gatherers to tribes, to agriculture, to cities, to empires and ended up with our current idea of nation states, which is supposed to be the pinnacle of societal development.

Turns out, this is simply not what happened, and modern archaeological data suggests that many societies around the planet and throughout history tried many different ways of organizing their living:

• huge cities without a central government, where power concentrated in local neighborhoods
• empires with a king but without a meaningful hierarchy of enforcing their rule
• people who tried agriculture and then consciously abandoned it while their neighbors still practiced it
• and even societies cycling between different forms of governance depending on the season

All of this is written based on real archaeological data and prior work by other researchers. It's a thick book full of references, which makes it hard to read: you have to constantly switch between the text and the references, as half of them are not just titles of other works, but long full paragraphs that should have really been part of text. Plus, the first third of the book is really like a preview to the rest of it, where they regurgitate and repeat a lot of the points stated earlier.

Here's a few random facts and tidbits I found fascinating that stuck in my head:

• European Renaissance thinkers likely got the idea of egalitarian societies and personal freedoms from American Indians. The latter were really not impressed with the idea of people having lords telling them what to do :-)

• One of the very first big settlements in the world were found in Ukraine, contemporary with the earliest cities of Mesopotamia.

• Early European archaeology focus on Mesopotamia, and their bias towards establishing the one true way from "primitive" cultures to dynasties is probably due to their desire to find kingdoms described in the Bible. They simply were not interested in a world-wide picture, as they already had a narrative.

• Schizmogenesis is a conscious choice of some peoples to live differently than their neighbors, despite sharing essentially the same environment. For example, ancient Pacific Northwest was split between heroic societies practicing war, slavery and display of wealth and more egalitarian societies with emphasis on personal freedom and sharing.

• It's tempting to look with irony on ancient Egyptians with their cult of dead kings and priests speaking on their behalf until you look at the modern USA with monuments like Mount Rushmore and the Supreme Court interpreting sacred words of Founding Fathers.

• Throughout history, egalitarian societies respecting personal freedoms tended to also respect women, while oppressive hierarchies worshiping heroic warriors tended to subjugate women and denigrate their roles. There are counter-examples, of course, but there is a strong correlation.

My only big regret from the book is that it doesn't really tell you how to fix our society and make it more fair. And it doesn't claim to try. What it does is it recalibrates the discourse and asks better questions: not "what is the source of societal inequality" but rather "how did we get stuck in our current state for so long". Ultimately, we should be able to build whatever society we want, and we should look in the past at least for good examples.