The Davids begin their book with the Enlightenment and the two poles of its views on civilization. First, there’s the Hobbesian view that we once lived as violent “primitives” whose bestial natures were tamed by the emergence of the hierarchies that inevitably arise with agriculture and are needed to manage the complexity of cities. Then there’s Rousseau, who argued that our “primitive” past was a time of pastoral equality and freedom, but that could not survive the hierarchies that inevitably accompany agriculture and are a regrettable necessity of cities.

Both Rousseau and Hobbes make it clear that these views are thought-experiments, not based on any observation or evidence of these “pre-civilized” ways of being; in their work (and in the writings of other Englightenment thinkers), they make arguments that they claim originated with indigenous Americans.

The attribution of heterodox, egalatarian and anti-coercive ideas to indigenous people is a commonplace of the Enlightenment. From multi-volume, best-selling, widely translated Jesuit accounts of dialogs with American indigenous intellectuals to sold-out plays that ran in Paris for decades, the Enlightenment attributed its ideology of liberty, autonomy and egalatarianism to indigenous people of the “New World.”

And yet, today, these attributions are widely discounted. They are characterized as convenient fairy tales spun by European thinkers who feared violent retribution — expulsion or even death — from the establishment if they put these thoughts in their own mouths, so they put them in the mouths of hypothetical “savages” from across the ocean.

But the Davids make a very compelling case — citing First Nations historians and anthropologists as well as the primary documents of the residents of New France and other American outposts of European societies — that the Enlightenment began with indigenous intellectuals of the Americas. These thinkers hailed from societies where leaders had to rely on persuasion, rather than coercion, to get people to follow their plans. They lived in societies that valued oratory, logic and rhetoric, where the natural response to an objectionable proposition was a devastating counterargument.

These indigenous intellectuals were responsible for “the Indigenous Critique” — a series of dialogs that spanned generations, crisscrossing the Atlantic both in written form and in person, as indigenous intellectuals visited Europe and mercilessly shredded the pre-Enlightenment consensus, inspiring European thinkers to the Enlightenment.

These Europeans — and their intellectual descendants — have devoted much of the time since in trying to formulate a theory for how we ended up the way we are: hierarchical, unequal, coercive. Starting with Rousseau and Hobbes, they spun a theory of the inevitable evolution of society: bands that yield tribes (whether noble or savage), that create agriculture and surplus and kings, that lead to cities and bureaucracy and hierarchy to manage complexity.

But — the Davids argue — the very origins of the Enlightenment disprove this hypothesis. The woodland people of the American northeast — source of the Indigenous Critique — lived in many ways. Some had agriculture but not hierarchy; some had hierarchy and not agriculture. The Americas had vast cities that were self-managed by local councils, and loose confederacies that were highly bureaucratized.

This is the jumping off point for a dizzying, thorough, beautifully told series of histories of ancient civilizations, many of which have only come into focus thanks to recent advances in archaeological technology. They show that every conceivable variation on centralization, coercion, hierarchy, violence, agriculture and urbanism has existed, in multiple places, for hundreds or thousands of years at a time.

More importantly, they reveal how thin the evolutionary theory of human civilization has worn. To maintain the neat picture of societies inevitable “progressing” through “stages,” we need to deploy increasingly unconvincing tricks, like calling 5,000 year periods of cultural stability “intermediate” or “early” or “late.”

But, the Davids say, something has happened. We’ve gotten stuck, here in the “modern” era. Civilizations through human history have all enjoyed some mix of three key freedoms:

I. The freedom to go somewhere else and expect to be welcomed thanks to duties of hospitality;

II. The freedom to disobey orders;

III. The freedom to imagine a different social arrangement.

These three freedoms are so thoroughly expunged from most of our modern world that we can barely imagine them. Indeed, much of the Davids’ work in this books is showing how the people who enjoyed these freedoms led complex, introspective, imaginative lives, rather than existing in a near-animal state.

They suggest that the most important of these freedoms is the third one — the freedom to imagine something else. Though they don’t invoke “capitalist realism” by name here, it’s highly relevant. When Margaret Thatcher declared “there is no alternative” (to unfettered, unequal, destructive unregulated market capitalism), she wanted it to be “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jameson).

The attack in imagination itself is the source of our immobilization, our incapacity to disobey orders, our helpless, fatalistic hurtling towards nuclear armageddon and climate collapse.

Seen in this light, Dawn of Everything is a crucial intervention, fuel for a new imagination of a world governed by a radically different theory of human nature. We can organize ourselves without hierarchy, without inequality, without coercion. Our ancestors built stable societies with radically different social arrangements, no matter whether they were complex or simple, urban or agricultural or nomadic.

The just-so story that says we must live this way is well past its sell-by date and I think we know it. Between the pandemic and the wars raging around the world, there is an urgent appetite for change. So much of that urgency has been channeled into authoritarianism, xenophobia and hate, because we’ve lost our ability to imagine solidarity. Lost it? It was stolen from us, but ideological “science” that cherry-picked the evidence to claim that our world was inevitable, not contingent.

David Graeber was one of the most hopeful people I knew, someone who could dream of other ways of being together, whose dreams were informed by his deep scholarship. Most of all, he was able to convey that vision to others.

He and Wengrow produced an important, world-changing book. Read it, and you will never be the same again.

https://davidgraeber.org/reviews/the-dawn-of-everything/