A Fresh Look at Human Society Challenges Everything We Learn

Heavy thoughts

It’s a massive book, but well worth reading.

I am slogging through it while a Northwest flood and freeze is thawing into spring flowers.

The pandemic is still raging even while “freedom convoy” protestors disrupt my focus. On an overcrowded flight, I struggle to summarize multiple points about “civilization.” While debates squabble on about teaching truth of race and gender history, I am introduced to several egalitarian past societies.

I am trying to concentrate on global expansionist history while Russia threatens Ukraine, and world stability.

Inequality rising

The book is The Dawn of Everything, a new human history by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It starts with a look back at the question famously addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the origins of inequality.

Rousseau, more by accident and a feeling that “it sounds about right” at the early age of enlightenment, argued that human beings left behind their primitive and child-like innocence when city state arose from agricultural regions. Rising along with them, were forceful leaders, patriarchy, priests, bureaucrats, and war machines.

The idea of the noble savage was born, then baptized with the blood of the French revolution — and beyond.

Yet, the ideas of having a voice and owning your own labor probably did not just erupt with a longing for bread and brotherhood in the early eighteenth century — even beyond that, the concept of sisterhood being powerful, (sibling-hood?) also has been posited more than once.

Traditional narratives are almost certainly wrong, at least insofar as primitive people being suddenly, and inalterably, bloomed into the hierarchies, agriculture, and societal arrangements of rank, gender, and race that we know today.

The idea of childlike innocence, of Rosseau’s noble savage is more savaged than salvaged. Also, the Hobbesian short and brutal life of “primitive man” is not quite brutalized, but severely critiqued.

World enough, and time

Surely, given the time spans involved with Paleolithic and Mesolithic humanity, much more than that was going on. The book more thoroughly investigates the last 30,000 years, the recent Neolithic. They admit to sparse clues, but draw on every one including human social-psychological discontent, the loss of nature spirituality, and the sacred feminine.

All together there is time, and space enough, on old Earth to have seen many, many manifestations. The two Davids’ research heavily, and dig deeply, at the intersection of archaeology and anthropology.

Decentralized centers

The authors bring the idea of diversity itself to culture and society.

There was never one way to be, then suddenly stone monuments, brooding kings, and all-authority priests showed up, barked orders, and began an arc of ranked societal structure that established capitalism. Nor were just tiny bands of naked hunter gatherers so busy foraging that they almost forgot to found civilization.

Instead, as we can see in the world even now, some structures are centered rigidly. Some centers are more sprawling, idiosyncratic, and more like ever-changing, shifting circles of order.

The book, whether you agree with the premise or not, provokes thoughts and questions assumptions. For example, how could people even could envision that they are seeing the birth of “democracy”, an unknown entity within highly organized “states” — which is yet another concept to define.

It is more likely to question, perhaps, whether the earth is at the center of the solar system, or that all animals share a genetic template — these things are at least observable in that we can see the stars, or other animals. But more difficult is to try to envision a concept of organizing societal structures in a non-authority, or linked authority, rotating system of influence and justice.

What if there is much more at work to influence how leadership evolves than just private property, or sacred ownership? Decentralization, and varying ideas of how to distribute food, goods, worship, and even popularity are examined in varying locations all over the world from the fertile “crescents” (more than one small area and climate) and many orders of pre-Columbian Americas.

Indigenous origins of concepts of democracy slide in and out of hazy bits of history. They influence enlightenment thought. There is much to be made of a vast pile of stones, but also the apparent abandonment of several lost structures from mythical villages and lost cities, to vast kingdoms and vanished egalitarian ways.

Making history

What we can know for sure is that imperialism, and colonialism, had their day and did not give birth — as we still hope for — to social justice, fair sharing of resources, and protection of our mutual home and habitats.

It’s worth wondering how and why.

Many critics have found flaws in the provided arguments, but given that there are so many of bits of both data and speculation here, that is to be expected.

There are thousands of strands of evidence, and yet thousands more questions and mysteries.

Our job is to think about equality, and not what we have, but what is possible.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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