Review of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow

[UndercoverElephant]

People keep recommending this best-selling book to me. While very interesting, the book ultimately falls flat on its face and reveals a fundamental problem with current leftist thinking on this subject. The basic claim of the book is that the orthodox narrative about human social evolution and deep history – variants of which are shared by people as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond – is all wrong. This wrongness, allegedly, is part of the reason why we cannot seem to imagine a different way of living now. This is the key claim of the book – without it, the book is a load of contents with nothing to hold it together.

The old narrative the authors are attacking is that humans started out organised into small “bands”, rather like chimpanzees, and as we went through the various stages of inventing agriculture, cities and eventually scientific-industrial civilisation, that organisation got bigger, more complex, and thoroughly hierarchical. The authors say this is nonsense, and provide a large amount of evidence as to why the beginning of that story is too simple. They draw on a lot of non-western sources, and on archeological evidence from the old world long before written history.

When reading it, I continually found myself asking “Where is this going?”, “What is the actual argument here?”, and each time I was expecting some progress they would go off in some other direction, with a new piece of information. It is only when you get to the conclusion that it becomes clear what is going on: the authors have spent the whole book working towards a desired conclusion that the book simply does not support.

From the conclusion:

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did...

This claim is not supported. It is an unexamined assumption. What do we mean by “wrong”? Who is judging what “wrong” means? The claim is far too vague, given how crucial it is the argument. What if nothing has gone wrong? What if this is just evolution doing what evolution does?

Right and wrong are human moral judgements. If we're saying something has gone morally wrong (as opposed to functionally wrong) then we need an ethical framework the authors have not supplied.

They then go on to argue that we appear to be “stuck” – that we cannot think of a different way to organise human society. Then, after a lot of wandering comments that aren't leading anywhere, we get this:

Perhaps the most stubborn misconception we've been tackling is to do with scale.

They argue that the existing narrative says that as human society went from small to large, inequality and all sorts of other problems followed. This, they say, is not reflected in evidence from deep history. It's all more complicated. Prehistoric and non-western societies were bigger, more flexible, more variable than that.

More directionless rambling follows. The ultimate question they ask is this: Why, if the old narrative we've spent the whole booking attacking isn't true – if humans can live in all sorts of different ways, including some that don't resemble hierarchically-organised sovereign states – why are we stuck with just our current version of civilisation? Why can't we think our way out of it? The answer the entire book has been building up to is “maybe it is because our origin myth is wrong – this narrative about large societies having to be hierarchical and the world being organised into sovereign states is inevitable – it's just not true, and realising that it is not true is a necessary step on liberating ourselves from our current state. "

Take one look at this conclusion from the point of view of the old narrative that everybody else still believes in and it's revealed to be prima facie total nonsense. The reason we are stuck with hierarchically-organised sovereign states is that it really is the only place we could have ended up. Civilisation as we know it overpowered all those other civilisations. The reason the native Americans and Australian aborigines were “assimilated” by western civilisation was because their versions of civilisation could not compete with the scientific, industrialised, hierarchically-organised western version. The reason why western history is so important is that it was the west that invented science and industrialisation, and reason that happened in the west is because the golden age of ancient Greece happened in the west. The reason we can't get rid of sovereign states is that the leaders of sovereign states have zero intention of giving control away to anybody else – that is what sovereignty means. And sovereign states are kept in existence by their military – the most extreme and important example of a hierarchical organisation. There is a reason why historians and philosophers spend a lot of time talking about wars. It is because history is written and the future is created by the winners of wars. Rome defeated Carthage because the Carthaginians were less willing to behave like The Borg. Same reason why Alexander destroyed Greek democracy.

The problem with their argument is that changing the beginning of the narrative (what happened in prehistory) and looking at things from the perspective of non-western civilisations which did not survive their encounter with the west, does not do much to change the rest of the story. A great deal of what has happened was indeed inevitable. Certainly as soon as science had been invented there was no hope of any non-scientific version of civilisation retaining control of its own culture and destiny. And exactly the same fate would befall any future civilisation which tries to abandon hierarchical organisation or the defence of sovereignty. Their nearest enemies will simply laugh in their faces, and conquer.

Therefore the problem with this book is that it is an attempt to defend an absurd and indefensible conclusion. There's nothing wrong with the scholarship, and it contains all sorts of interesting information, some of which may be of use in the construction of the concept of ecocivilisation. But that's not what the authors want to do. What the authors want to do is debunk the orthodox narrative about large scale civilisation having to be hierarchial and about sovereign states being inevitable. Their book doesn't come even close to doing it. In fact, it falls so far short that in the end it serves only as a reductio ad absurdum of the conclusion they are trying to defend. Civilisation as we know it was basically inevitable, and there are fundamental reasons why we cannot reform it. Unfortunately it is also unsustainable. Put those two facts together and the conclusion we actually end up with is not that if we really use our imaginations we can get rid of sovereign states and hierarchies, but that civilisation as we know it is going to collapse.

Ecocivilisation is not going to come about by the ending of sovereign states and hierarchies. What is actually going to happen is that the sovereign states are going to be forced to choose between radically reforming themselves internally or disappearing off the map. In other words ecocivilisation is still possible, but Graeber and Wengrow are barking up the wrong tree. Instead of denying that sovereignty and hierarchy are necessary and exhorting people to think more imaginatively, what we need to be doing is figuring out how to turn our own sovereign states into ecocivilisations. Then, if and when many different sovereign states are heading in that direction, maybe it will be possible for them to co-operate and start creating a globalised version of ecocivilisation.

The problem, of course, is that this whole idea causes major problems for the existing narrative of leftist politics. If sovereign states and hierarchies continue to exist and globalised civilisation starts seriously collapsing then we will be left with a competition to survive and a desperate need to get control of sustainability at the level of the sovereign states. And that has major implications for what is going to be the most serious ethical issue of the collapse/post-growth era: control of human migration. Lifeboat ethics in one form or another.

[clv101]

I quite liked the 'Debt' book, but sorry to say I gave up on this one a quarter way in!

[UndercoverElephant]

I quite liked the 'Debt' book, but sorry to say I gave up on this one a quarter way in!

Yes, I started skimming at that point. Then I skipped to the conclusion and it all became clear. It is fairly easy to reverse engineer how the book came into existence, and there never was any proper joined up thinking at the conceptual level.

[northernmonkey]

Civilizational history runs in pretty predictable cycles. We are just in a particular part of the latest cycle, that's all. Everything is panning out entirely predictably if you stand back far enough to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBLPDfu8XGQ