The Dawn of Everything

• In chapter 1, "Farewell to Humanity's Childhood", Graeber and Wengrow introduce the positions they will later argue against, along with some of the strongest arguments that have been advanced in their support. These are some of the most familiar tropes in anthropology today. Their aim is to contrast these "Just-So" stories and stereotypes that have restricted the popular imagination concerning the origin of complex societies, and illustrate what the practical consequences that this loss of imagination has meant for contemporary society. Using vivid examples, they make their case that human agency and our historical trajectory is shaped by the imagination, and retarded when this is constrained and impoverished. The reader is encouraged to see the possibility for liberation, and reject a narrative that resigns them to the currently extant social structures. They note, “as long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative creatures...? What if we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? ...It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean." Graeber and Wengrow write "a conceptual shift is required [to open] new doors of the imagination”, and “lack of imagination is not itself an argument”. The chapter closes with “Something has been lost.” That something is the imaginative-imitative capacity at work in our broader society today.

To illustrate this, several examples are introduced to the reader. The story of Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman abducted by Yanomami is given. We read Benjamin Franklin's 1753 letter to Peter Collinson about how, provided the choice, people tend to prefer life among the indigenous peoples of America as opposed to living in European/colonial society. Among the reasons given for this is “freedom from the expectation of constant toil” and the assertion given by Oscar Wilde, who declared "he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories". And indeed who does? (A relatedly pragmatic explanation was given in the next chapter: “Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom... people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive.”) The authors conclude, “The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.” Where else have our imaginations failed? In our ability to consider alternative non-market explanations for trade. Consider that the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands developed “for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations”, and traveling healers, women’s gambling, etc. can account for the wide distribution of goods. So why do we frequently accept the less imaginative market explanations for the spread of artifacts? 

• In chapter 2, "Wicked Liberty", we read that the most common way in which "conceptual shackles" are shed and a shift is achieved is through exposure to new cultures and ideas. “The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas [from other world regions] came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment’.” This is imitation in action. Iain McGilchrist associated this influx primarily with the Renaissance, but the point is taken: “Western thought” isn’t really Western at all. Statecraft from China via Liebniz? Yes, and much more besides. The imaginative-imitative process occurred again in dramatic fashion through exposure to New World peoples, though we ignore the powerful influence they had on our cultural evolution, and we deny the agency of the thinkers responsible for exposing us to these ideas. (Perhaps, if we follow McGilchrist's ideas on this matter, this is partially explained by the left hemisphere reasserting it's control on our ways of thinking, contributing to a "Dark Age" that we have yet to fully emerge from.) Graeber and Wengrow state that “social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept”, but to be more precise, though the concept did exist, it wasn't engaged with and given the same detailed attention that discourse with Indigenous thinkers later elevated it to. Similarly, those who questioned the wisdom of pursuing wealth and fame as guides to a virtuous life were common enough (see Diogenes, among others), but examples of widespread social practices that had no place for extreme wealth concentration were virtually unknown. ...Europeans at the time simply could not believe what they were hearing, and couldn't accept the source of these compelling arguments. “How could such rhetorical facility have come to those with no awareness of the works of Varro and Quintilian?" Simply put, they could not "be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present." The cultural appropriation of ideas without proper attribution resulted.

And so, Rousseau “strips his ‘savages’ of any imaginative powers of their own; their happiness is entirely derived from their inability to imagine things otherwise, or to project themselves into the future in any way at all.” Indigenous thinking was widely recognized, it was lauded as worthy of serious engagement, but the context and source in which it found its development was completely ignored. In the 1960's the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that the sort of people we like to imagine as "simple and innocent" are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like precisely because they’re more imaginative than we are! Graeber and Wengrow take this opportunity to restate their thesis: "Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it." Imagination and agency are bound to each other. The contrast is made that “for most of European history intellectuals seem to have been the only class of people who weren’t capable of imagining that other worlds might be brought into being.”

The influence and example of Kandiaronk sparked all manner of new ideas in European society: “To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.” The European “form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behaviour... the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well, [it] would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest". Like Kwame Anthony Appiah did much later, Kandiaronk made a structural argument to explain the failings of European society, using his characteristically eloquent rhetorical form (something our authors note can later lead to the schismogenesis of Gregory Bateson if not accurately understood). Descriptions are provided for how criminal behavior is handled differently among indigenous people, where external coercion and control by authorities is less pronounced, yet resolutions are more easily arrived at. “Anyone who has ever learned a truly alien language [knows] that doing so takes a great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts... understand the other’s point of view”. Rousseau wrote that perhaps our gravest mistake was imagining that property rights, legal structures, and government enforcement could preserve our liberty. Today it seems rather that our eventual undoing will be the result of a lack of imagination. It has made us both more arrogant and more dangerous than ever before. This chapter closes ominously: “something has gone terribly wrong with the world.”

• Chapter 3, "Unfreezing the Ice Age" begins with the lines “Most societies imagine a mythic age of creation, when it was possible for things to come into being that were entirely new, in a way that cannot really happen any more. In these lesser days, we are reduced to endlessly repeating the great gestures of that time.” [This echoes Schelling, who wrote about the "repetition of the original series of acts" in System of Transcendental Idealism.] The Davids (as we might hence affectionately refer to Graeber and Wengrow) devote a large portion of this chapter to contrasting linear and non-linear views of the evolution of social structures: "Patterns of seasonal variation lie behind monuments raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again." Oscillating patterns of life made it manifestly clear that social arrangements are "not simply ‘given’ in the natural order of things, but at least partially open to human intervention; no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable". Practices of institutional flexibility provided "the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect, to make and unmake the political worlds, to imagine alternative social orders and therefore create ‘societies against the state’". The Davids suggest that early societies "self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge". For example, "Plains nations were also careful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield coercive authority: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in the next."

Is this a radical suggestion? Yes, as they write, "The notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age. Anyone classified as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality’, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind. Politically self-consciousness Nambikwara chiefs and the wild improvisation of Nuer prophets had no place." In contrast to this the Davids point out that "those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as skeptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments". (See Paul Radin's 1927 book "Primitive Man as Philosopher".) They are generally tolerant of skeptics, the unorthodox, eccentrics, and people displaying various degrees of unconventionality. They further assert that "What really makes us human is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between alternatives. Our early ancestors were our cognitive and intellectual equals, and also grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity... People in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more politically self-conscious than people nowadays."

Indeed, "while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way... tactics employed have included ridicule, shame, shunning (ostracization), and in the last resort, assassination... For instance, while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Christopher Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently [counterfactual thinking]. The essence of politics is the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another." The Davids reject ontologically essentialist conceptions of human nature and historical determinism and instead focus on the role of human agency in the context of an open-ended future. [However notions of essentialism that permit the 're-making' of unfixed natures (see David Eagleton, After Theory) are compatible.] Today, seasonal festivals are a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation. "The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings... If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we lose that political self-consciousness? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? Why did Homo sapiens allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?" At this point the reader may advance their personal theories. I draw upon Iain McGilchrist's work for much of mine... "Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings. But even if all monarchies, including ceremonial monarchies, were to disappear, some people would still play at being kings." This is most certainly true. We now have a non-linear perspective upon social evolution. If this is characterized as a "coincidentia oppositorum" between the Master and his Emissary (to borrow McGilchrist's allegory), would such an explanatory framework accommodate the potential for a phase transition leading to a protracted imbalance (our current 'stuckness')? We will see what the Davids have to say about this in the following chapters. 

• Chapter 4, “Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property” begins with a very startling observation: “The overall direction of history – at least until very recently – would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other... what we observe is not so much the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language.” A considerable part of this chapter is devoted to describing some of the ways in which this has manifested, including the rise of a purely utilitarian form of “possessive individualism” (rooted though it was in notions of sacredness). This central (anti)social organizing concept reinforced a work culture with less leisure time and more hours spent in wage slavery, and these in turn precipitated a move from substantive freedoms to merely formal freedoms. The Davids write “We might ask why all this has happened. What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours? This is an important question.” They prefaced this with a reminder that humans are “fundamentally imaginative creatures”, so the diminution of our physical and social lives, and the corresponding effects on our imaginative capacities, had a catastrophic effect on our cultures, our health, and our relationships. This is no small matter. Iain McGilchirst includes the imagination as among our most important faculties. According to him our contemporary tendency to discredit that capacity (and in general the majority of cognitive processes that lateralize to the right hemisphere) has gotten us into the social/ecological mess we find ourselves in to begin with. Why? Because the right hemisphere is able to see the larger picture, which is to say that it is able to see our overarching commonalities. An atrophied imagination will no longer so easily apprehend what we share in common, and people will instead attend more to those features that divide us. This is a process of cultural evolution (not cultural determinism), so as physical and social lives narrowed, so too was there a tendency for imaginative capacities to follow. 

The notions of possessive ownership and private property are problematic for many reasons. “We take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms”. Wrapped up in that notion is a “right to exclude others”, and “the option of not taking care of [property], or even destroying it at will”. This should sound very ominous, given what we know about global health today. The authors conclude “If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.” Here Graeber’s activist voice is coming through. He’s suggesting that what caused our current ‘stuckness’ was a transformation of perspective upon our place among ecological relationships. The Western world no longer saw itself as “merely squatters, poachers, or at best caretakers” - humans playing a supporting role in the larger tapestry of life. Instead, we took for ourselves the freedom to exclude and destroy at will, to shred the tapestry of life and rend it’s constituent relations, if that would suit our purposes. We released the impulses of our left hemisphere from the cautionary restrictions imposed by a wiser right hemisphere and gave it free reign over the world, with powerful technologies to help solidify its hold. Perhaps the Anthropocene began when Oppenheimer uttered those prophetic words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This perspectival shift maintains and organizes our contemporary political economies today, and a distinctly nihilistic, exploitative orientation toward nature. Blinded as we were, is it any wonder that we failed to recognize that “what to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years”?

• Chapter 5, “Many Seasons Ago” once again contrasts two accounts of cultural development, that of determinism and that of conscious choice: “Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation… Those who don’t follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history. This approach presumes that we are already, effectively, stuck. This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination.” Determinism is rooted in a left hemisphere perspective, per Iain McGilchrist. How does our contemporary deterministic view relate to schismogenesis? Does this view prevent the sort of fractal speciation that defined our past? And has determinism reinforced cultural integration, conformity, and stasis? The Davids contrast attitudes toward slavery in neighboring cultures: “Slavery became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating them from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schismogenetic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. This was by no means just an argument about slavery; it appears to have affected everything from the configuration of households, law, ritual and art to conceptions of what it meant to be an admirable human being, and was most evident in contrasting attitudes to work, food and material wealth. This resulted in the overwhelming rejection of the practice of slavery, and the class system it entailed... The ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be. Ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence.”

The Davids had asked rhetorically, “Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?” The answer appears to be yes. Schismogenesis was last discussed in the second chapter about seventeenth-century French colonists and the Wendat people. It’s the central theme here. The ‘antitypes’ of Athens and Sparta are one example. But our attention here is on the Yurok people of California, ‘possessive individualists’, similar in many ways to Protestant capitalists, but who also practiced redistribution of resources. “Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth’.” We hear local myths about the ‘Wogies’ and the hero who defeated Le’mekwelolmei, cautionary tales about the danger of becoming a “capturing society” (as described by Fernando Santos-Granero) like those the peoples who lived to the north. “When ‘someone else’s purpose in life is to interfere with you, he must be stopped, lest you become his slave, his “pet”.” For Marcel Mauss, “Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal… Crucially, Mauss noted, this process tends to be quite self-conscious. ‘Societies’, wrote Mauss, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.” Not quite psychological reactance, this otherwise highly selective adoption of traits from foreign cultures also finds an echo in Stephen Krashen’s hypothesis about language: "Language has two functions: To communicate and to mark membership in a social group, which is why we do not always imitate the accents we hear the most." Despite being perfectly capable of doing so, we do not necessarily imitate others. The self/other, mimesis/alterity distinction is powerful. This selective refusal to imitate others may also explain the genesis of linguistic diversity, the concerns regarding cultural appropriation, and contemporary dynamics between Western and Indigenous peoples. The schismogenetic explanation is very versatile. In the Yurok example we see that a conscious desire to not be a capturing society eventually led to the contrast of most other (though not all) cultural traits. There’s little doubt that the Yurok recognized this oppositional process of differentiation at work among them, and used stories to maintain attention on those cultural features necessary to actively maintain it. We might ask ourselves: How might we similarly shift our attention so as to oppose contemporary social structures that threaten us? The effect of having neighboring capturing societies in the north resulted in the creation of comparatively more egalitarian and peaceful neighbors to the south. Can we make parallels between this and the contemporary global situation? Can the dynamic of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), through schismogenesis, lead to more effective cultural structures for nuclear deterrence within the United Nations, or might it lead to something altogether different? Does schismogenesis require actual agents and cultures to operate, or can we contrast ourselves with hypothetical scenarios to prevent crises before they occur (effectively precluding schismogenesis to begin with)? 

• Chapter 6, "Gardens of Adonis", highlights the observation that what we call "The Agricultural Revolution" took at least 3000 years and was in no way a 'revolution' in the way we would think of it today, and thus the popular narratives, repeated for example by Yuval Noah Harari among others, are entirely inaccurate. The Davids describe how "flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops. Seasonal flooding does the work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. No need for deforestation, weeding or irrigation." And the motivations for the domestication of crops and animals, "a series of local specializations in crop-raising and animal-herding... might well have had more to do with sociability, romance or adventure than material advantage as we’d normally conceive it." But these motivations, being non-utilitarian, go against the sort of left hemisphere point of view of how cultural evolution is understood. Could it be that cultural transformation and change is driven by 'relational values' and not purely seeking the advantage of power? 

Another popular assumption the Davids upend is that there is any necessary connection between a shift to farming and social stratification and violence. The evidence does not support this: "among upland groups, furthest removed from a dependence on agriculture, we find stratification and violence becoming entrenched; while their lowland counterparts, who linked the production of crops to important social rituals, come out looking decidedly more egalitarian; and much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual". So can we finally put cultural determinism to rest? But what then might be able to explain violence? Their explanation should be familiar by now: "mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis... one group of people seems to make a great display of going against some highly characteristic behaviour of their neighbours... The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism – and vice versa." This self-conscious differentiation should remind us of McGilchrist's continual emphasis on the coincidence of opposites. While on one level the lowlanders and uplanders may be aware that they are defining themselves in opposition to each other, on another level they may or may not be aware that this process can itself be consciously reflected upon. In doing so, one may find new ways to differentiate that do not need to conflict with values. This is a lesson for contemporary cultures as well.

As McGilchrist has pointed out, the values of utility and power are characteristic of a distinctly left hemisphere perspective, but both evidence and experience point out that these considerations (utility and power) do not reign supreme in actual practice. Assuming that they do has resulted in a distorted view of both history and contemporary social roles and relationships. We can see this distortion in the 'tech bro' ideology of 'longtermism', a form of escapism that blinds and desensitizes the privileged few. David Karpf calls this "a profound failure of the imagination". Douglas Rushkoff noted that some of it's adherents, including Elon Musk, have been described as "seed people" who have a desire to spread their "seed". This narrow focus on the projection of power and influence, reductively understood as genetic material, into interplanetary space and over cosmic timescales, is also visible within the modern cultural zeitgeist, albeit to a much lesser extent, when the expectation to bear and raise children is socially enforced for reasons that have more to do with social prestige and influence than the sheer joy of living with others and sharing experiences together. Interestingly, this parallels the contemporary fear of "demographic collapse" where populations that are at or below replacement levels dread the prospect of losing national power in the congress of prosperous nations.

[Chapter 7: The Ecology of Freedom, to come...]

A possibly alternative view: 

Chris Williamson: "Why is it that we [civilizations] appear to have a bias of drifting toward the left [hemisphere's view of the world]?"
Iain McGilchrist: "The question why civilizations go this way is a very interesting one. In the preface to the new edition of The Master and His Emissary, a short essay about 15 pages long, I point to about six reasons that societies do this. One of the most obvious is that using the left hemisphere simply enables you to become good at grabbing things. And as societies grow people see more and more power disposable to them, so people who are interested in self-aggrandizement and the annexation of power (psychopaths and narcissists) tend to drift to the top of civilizations. We can certainly see this being enacted for us in Europe at the moment. ...This business of having an empire, thinking you can control large areas of the world, feed straight into using the left hemisphere. And the left hemisphere's picture is the one that language is designed to put across."