Anarchy and civilisation

The book, The Dawn of Everything, points out many rational fallacies and examples of circular reasoning arising from the failure of our imaginations when we guess at the motivations of alien cultures

Homo sapiens have been around for perhaps 200,000 years and we have little idea about how we lived during the first 195,000 or so, of those. The eminent 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed primitive humans lived happy, childlike lives, as members of small, free-roaming bands of hunter-gatherers. This was until such time as mankind developed agriculture and settled down, becoming more hierarchical and less happy. However, the equally eminent 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, postulated individuals in hunter-gatherer bands must have been selfish creatures with nasty, brutish and short lives, until they were civilised by the advent of agriculture (and thus, became happier).

Hobbes and Rousseau had no scientific tools to validate their thought experiments. In contrast this book, co-authored by two eminent anthropologists (Graeber died in 2020) leans upon cross-disciplinary research to claim both philosophers were wrong.

Archaeology and anthropology buttressed by science (DNA analysis, carbon dating, Light Detection and Ranging or LIDAR surveys) shows hunter-gatherer societies often had, and can have complex organisations. So much for Rousseau’s childlike savages. There’s also ample evidence such societies are not naturally selfish, and life wasn’t necessarily nasty or brutish. Incapacitated or ill members were taken care of. So much for Hobbes. The two Davids also take on Steven Pinker’s famous assertion that despite the massive genocides of the last century, humanity is becoming progressively less violent.

The book points out many rational fallacies and examples of circular reasoning arising from the failure of our imaginations when we guess at the motivations of alien cultures. It is assumed, for example, that there was commerce between prehistoric cultures, because trinkets and artefacts that originated in one place often ended up in another place, thousands of miles away.

It is hard for a modern human to conceptualise reasons other than trade for such movements. But the authors point out that there are cultures (such as seafaring tribes in New Guinea and Native Americans) that exchange such tokens for reasons unrelated to commerce.

Social scientists start with a common set of assumptions, often buried so deep as to be unquestioned. They assume that as societies become complex, more tied to material possessions and more sophisticated in terms of services, they inevitably become less equal since hierarchies develop to manage the complexity.

But is it entirely true that hierarchies are necessary to manage “progress”? Highly complex cultures may be socially flat. The most striking example would be the Harappan civilisation, which had no palaces but built cities with indoor flush toilets and carried out maritime trade. Ditto for many sophisticated Native American societies.

The book is revelatory in more ways than simply in questioning axiomatic assumptions. It asserts that Europeans steeped in kingship, nobility and church only discovered the concept of social equality when they encountered “flat” Native American cultures. Indeed, the European Enlightenment, which is founded on the concept of “natural law” going beyond scripture, developed as a direct result of contact and debate with flat Native American societies.

Overall, this is a hard book to describe, although it’s a surprisingly easy, and irreverent read. There are three thickly interwoven strands running through. One is an anecdotal description of prehistoric and “primitive” societies, which shows how complex these cultures actually were, and are. The second strand arises from the first — this is the contention that we need to question axiomatic assumptions about the past, and how cultures worked and work.

The third strand is an abstraction that follows from the second. This is extrapolation: If our understanding and knowledge of the past changes, this must necessarily affect the way we approach and shape the future.

The first strand, the anecdotal descriptions, can only be described as magisterial. It covers a wide sweep of cultures, and packs in a dizzyingly dense amount of information about so-called “primitive” societies. What is more, it does so in an accessible and engaging fashion. Any reader, including perhaps academics working in the same spaces, would be enlightened and entertained. This alone is worth the steep cover price.

The second strand is where readers will start running into their own biases. The argument that unorganised, non-hierarchical cultures — anarchistic societies as it were — can work well and nurture the development of highly complex, but socially flat cultures is challenging. 

Extrapolating from here, we might envisage future cultures that are non-hierarchical and non-materialistic in approach, while being technologically advanced. Indeed, science fiction writers such as Iain Banks in his Culture novels, and Ursula K Le Guin in The Dispossessed have postulated such cultures.

The arguments made in the “third strand” are sweeping and well-constructed but you might not necessarily agree with them. It helps if you know that the authors are both anarchists in principle! This is a big book in all senses of the word and it deserves to be read carefully, and digested slowly.