James Nicoll Reviews

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021’s The Dawn of Everything is, as its subtitle proclaims, a non-fiction book presenting A New History of Humanity. Although really, what they offer is a new interpretation of history. Which would not be as snappy a subtitle.

There is a standard version of the progression of technology and civilization that many of us learned in school: a long uncharted stone age of wandering tribes leading simple, boring, uniform lives, the domestication of plants and animals, the rise of towns and cities, the creation of centralized states, and finally after some fuss, Canada. Whether or not all that was good is open to debate, but there is a certain degree of inevitability about it all. A leads to B leads to C and so on, each stage bringing additional complexity and challenges.

It would be disturbing if the facts did not to line up nicely with the model. Graeber and Wengrow suggest that they don’t.

Why do modern humans suck so very badly? Is it because by embracing agriculture, we sentenced ourselves to hierarchical, exploitative societies in which most people are essentially serfs? Or were people always terrible? Could it be that people in the past were even worse, that as awful as some of our institutions are, they mitigate to some small extent the essential horribleness of human beings and so represent progress?

The authors find both ​“humans fell from grace” and ​“humans were damned to begin with” unsatisfactory. The authors assert that the truth is too complicated to be summed up in a simple sentence. Humans are inherently political, therefore even societies that left no physical evidence must have been equally political, therefore humans have likely always embraced a wide variety of solutions to arranging their societies, even in the 200,000 years of human existence about which we know nothing.

What follows is seven hundred pages of rambling discourse with two goals: to explain why the modern consensuses regarding human development came to look the way it does (which the authors mostly credit to the European reaction to First Nations critiques of Europe), while highlighting cultures that don’t fit the standard model. There are many endnotes and a voluminous index.

~oOo~

I’ve owned Dawn for years, but somehow never seemed to get far into it. It’s hard to fit a seven-hundred-page hardcover into the interstices between reviews. Thus this review, because if something is work, I can find the time.

I found myself wondering if I were in any way qualified to determine if this volume is:

• a revolutionary new paradigm, or
• seven hundred pages of carefully curated anecdotes that do not add up to a coherent model.

Well, of course I’m not qualified. I have some expertise in speculative fiction, but that genre has a dubious relationship to reality. I also know enough to know that knowing something about one field doesn’t necessarily confer knowledge about other fields, as convenient as it would be to believe it does. I can point to the long history of Nobel laureates making confident assertions in fields of which they know nothing.

The authors made numerous confident assertions that I really wished I had the research materials and time to double check¹. The text is solidly endnoted, but that’s just the first step towards verification. The authors sound convincing, but that’s a skill orthogonal to being correct. Velikovsky sounded convincing, at least to anyone unfamiliar with physics or any other field on which he expounded.

There are some odd word choices. I thought ​“Amerindian” was a deprecated phrase. The authors use ​“evolutionist” and ​“neo-evolutionist” in a manner that concerns me as a former regular on Usenet’s talk.origins. It could be the authors use those phrases in accordance with their field’s accepted vernacular, with which I am not familiar.

Also, just because the assertions that ​“humans suck, now” and ​“humans have always sucked” are unpleasant and unsatisfactory does not necessarily make them wrong.

I can say that the book was a fascinating read and that it drew my attention to historical questions that I had ignored as interesting but not pressing². Even if I in the end decide that the authors’ conclusions are insufficiently supported (or more reasonably, that I lack the expertise and cognitive capacity to judge), I don’t begrudge the time I invested thinking about the questions this book raised.

As well, even if the authors’ conclusions are completely wrong, this is valuable world-building source material for the speculative fiction world. Nobody objects when authors explore the consequences of nonsensical elements such as faster-than-light drives or fire-breathing dragons. Alternative social models could be equally useful. The questions and all the alternative models they suggest are valuable³ because they expand the sociological and anthropological materials on which SFF authors can draw.

Finally, The Dawn of Everything provides with me with material that I can breathlessly, uncritically (mis)quote at great length the next time I corner a historian, anthropologist, or archaeologist at an event. How I will awe and delight them!

The Dawn of Everything is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Example of one of the things I would want to check, because it looked dicey: the authors claimed that ​“Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America” in many different Native American societies. Perhaps I have misread or misinterpreted what they meant?

2: Something I had noted but not deeply considered: if colonial cultures are obviously, inherently superior to indigenous cultures, why does it require so much concerted effort to force indigenous people to adopt them?

3: I was also intrigued by the many ways in which the authors managed to courteously assert or imply that their academic colleagues have been woefully mistaken, perhaps even intellectually dishonest. Ways that will not provide material for libel suits. As someone who occasionally has to explain to people that their bold choices are egregious fire code violations that will surely doom us all, novel, courteous alternatives for fifteen minutes of irate shouting and gesturing are always useful.