A final, unexpected gift

October 21, 2021 10:07 PM

Human History Gets a Rewrite (SLAtlantic) William Deresiewicz reviews the forthcoming The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally.

posted by clark (27 comments total)

I'm reading Utopia of Rules with my work colleagues book club right now and really excited to suggest this as our next book. Graeber is an intoxicatingly fun thinker to read and I'm honestly stoked to see a possibly less edited and polished version.
posted by potrzebie at 11:07 PM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

How to change the course of human history (previously)
posted by kliuless at 11:18 PM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I very nearly wrote the article off entirely early on. It's been a long time since anyone serious has said that there was a strictly linear progression from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to kings and bureaucracy and states and that differently organized societies never existed (for long) alongside each other. Even particularly parochial Americans have had the evidence against that idea right under our feet, to the point it was taught in school at least as far back as the 80s.

Luckily, I read on and found that that wasn't what the book was actually about.
posted by wierdo at 11:20 PM on October 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

Non-paywalled version of Human History Gets a Rewrite, the FPP link.
posted by bendy at 12:00 AM on October 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don’t trust scholars who look into human history and see their own politics reflected back at them without wondering whether they might be missing something, and that’s the impression this article gives of Graeber.

It sounds like an improvement over the comfortingly bowdlerized bedtime stories of Pinker and his ilk, but not in any essential way.
posted by jamjam at 12:04 AM on October 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

One of my interests is the dawn of civilization and the ancient past. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in.
posted by zardoz at 12:55 AM on October 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

MeFi's own David Graeber, though his connection with the site was brief and not very happy.

The Guardian ran a long extract from the book this week: Unfreezing the ice age: the truth about humanity's deep past.
posted by verstegan at 1:50 AM on October 22, 2021 [11 favorites]

And that paper's more measured review.

...there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest... All the same, the strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions.

posted by PhineasGage at 4:23 AM on October 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is one of the few books I've ever preordered, and I can't believe the whole world is getting to read it before me! But while everyone is talking about how this continues Graeber's legacy, and without taking away from how enjoyable his books are, let me put in a plug for Wengrow too! His What Makes Civilization? is a fun look at what we know about the ancient Near East, about how we exoticize it even as it lays the foundations of our modern western societies--it'd make a great appetizer to this new book!
posted by mittens at 5:04 AM on October 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Kinda reminds me of a lot of the themes in Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Which I highly recommend, especially if you've been down on humanity lately (which after these past 5 years seems highly likely!).
posted by Grither at 6:30 AM on October 22, 2021

I read the review in The Guardian and decided to order it, and I am looking forward to its arrival. It's always fun when someone thinks in different ways, and though I think it is pretty mainstream to acknowledge that we don't know much about prehistorical times, this book seems to be a good reminder that all sorts of things can have happened. Heck, if there are still humans on earth 10.000 years from now, what will they be able to learn about our age? Not much, I'm sure.
And what can we learn from what is left of ancient cultures? What we find can both be random and deliberate. Where we find it can both be random and deliberate. I mean, obviously, stone constructions that cost thousands of hours of work and calculation skills are probably meant to last, at least for a while. But because of the "Norsing Around" thread, I was looking at runes, and it seems the oldest datable runic inscription is on a comb. It was found as part of a huge cache of weapons in a bog, but I don't imagine the comb in itself had a grand ideological meaning. (AFAIK, we don't know exactly why people threw weapons in bogs back then).
One of the things I'm fascinated by these days is how much prehistoric people traveled around. Not just as hunter-gatherers following the flocks of beasts, as it was described in my childhood history book, but as traders and with other intentions, perhaps like visiting family from the old place. They must have been much better at finding their way than most modern people are.
posted by mumimor at 6:41 AM on October 22, 2021

This Machine Kills discussed this work over two episodes of their podcast (one is paywalled).
posted by tummy_rub at 6:52 AM on October 22, 2021

They must have been much better at finding their way than most modern people are.

There were a lot of skills they had that we don't have today. I remember being in Glacier NP reading the signs on a nature walk. They explained what each plant was and what it was used for: food, medicine, rope, fish trapping, and more. I could barely tell one plant from the other, much less know how to work those plants into their desired uses.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:54 AM on October 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

They must have been much better at finding their way than most modern people are.

Heck, I'm better at finding my way than most of the smartphone generation, and that's only one layer of technology between us.

I found the lectures that they gave together leading up to the book really interesting (for example), and I'm glad to see Wengrow completing the project after Graeber's death. The main insight I gleaned from the lectures is that humans have consciously explored all manner of political organization at every scale and stage of history. I'm sure, as weirdo mentioned above, that this is not news to people who have been following all the threads of the literature, but it's nice to have someone brilliant like Graeber (and Wengrow, I'm sure) pull all the threads together into a coherent, readable account.
posted by clawsoon at 7:03 AM on October 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

Graeber & Wengrow's critique appears similar to the theories advanced in Capitalism & Schizophrenia, where the State is present within societies from the start, but that societies develop a number of different strategies to ward off its worst tendencies. I look forward to reading it!
posted by Richard Saunders at 7:49 AM on October 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm always interested in reading more Graeber.
posted by doctornemo at 10:50 AM on October 22, 2021

I look forward to reading it. Even if the case made is selective, it's still fun to read a completely different analysis of something.

It's Friday afternoon and my hardback copy has just arrived.
posted by atrazine at 11:16 AM on October 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’ve written a few articles on Poverty Point, the prehistoric site in Louisiana mentioned in the book and the Atlantic Piece. And damn, that place is incredible. Imagining "simple" hunter-gatherers with little or no social organization building such massive earthworks is just impossible.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:35 AM on October 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Those people accusing the authors of "cherry picking" are probably accusing the authors of writing another grand narrative, when that's not how Graeber has constructed arguments in the past.

If this is anything like Debt, the book thesis probably goes more like, "but what if not?" And proceeds to tell the stories of counterexample after counterexample after counterexample to a hegemonic narrative.

A book like that, like 'the origin of species' or 'the many headed hydra' can get boring, since it's the same 'here's a counterexample' thesis every chapter, just with another bit of specific evidence at the center.

So I appreciate the readable way that Debt was written. This style can be taken by some to be 'less than academic' in certain, extremely boring and gatekeepery arenas, but the footnotes would normally indicate otherwise.

So, looking forward to this! Debt was great bathroom reading, even.
posted by eustatic at 5:20 AM on October 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

eustatic, I think that's right. The thing is, to successfully prick the dominant grand narrative only requires a few counter-examples. They don't necessarily need to stand up a coherent counter-grand-narrative to make their point.

A lot of big revolutions in physics essentially came from spotting results that simply didn't fit existing theories and nobody says that the discovery of neutrinos or the orbit of Mercury not fitting classical mechanics are "cherry picking" because the existing theory covered most cases.

The point is that the existing theory makes not just general but universal claims and universal claims are inherently not robust to counter-examples. The universality of the claims is also used to justify either normative statements or just acceptance of certain social realities. If it true, not just most of the time but literally always, that complex societies generate and require hierarchy then anarchists like Graeber are wrong or at least are asking us to give up the benefits of complex societies in the name of theoretical liberty. If those benefits include large scale food production then anarchy is genocide on a tremendous scale.

If, on the other hand, the hegemonic theory is almost always correct but there exists even a single well proven counter-example then that falls apart. The hegemonic theory may still have tremendous explanatory power historically if it covers most cases but as soon as the impregnable wall of genuine universality is breached with a pinprick of counter-example, its use as any kind of guide to present politics completely disappears forever.
posted by atrazine at 7:28 AM on November 1, 2021

Brad DeLong is not a fan: "I see the late David Graeber is in the news today. I do not trust anything he ever wrote. Let me tell you why."
posted by mittens at 8:15 AM on November 1, 2021

I tried to read Debt because so many MeFites raved about it, but I gave up a third of the way through because so many of his assertions were obviously false and driven by his ideology rather than by facts. He was a polemicist, not a scholar. I have no doubt that many aspects of the current 'consensus' view of humankind's development are incorrect, but I have no reason to believe this new book is a proper corrective.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:13 AM on November 1, 2021

PhineasGage: I tried to read Debt because so many MeFites raved about it, but I gave up a third of the way through because so many of his assertions were obviously false and driven by his ideology rather than by facts. He was a polemicist, not a scholar. I have no doubt that many aspects of the current 'consensus' view of humankind's development are incorrect, but I have no reason to believe this new book is a proper corrective.

I've seen one criticism in detail of Debt, which called a bunch of what he said about pre-industrial Asian economies obviously false.

I had some familiarity with the source material he was basing it on, though - the scholarship of Kenneth Pomeranz and the "California school", in particular The Great Divergence - and I knew that Graeber was reporting the conclusions of Pomeranz in a relatively straightforward way. There were people who disagreed with Pomeranz, and the work of Pomeranz has inspired vigorous debate and research that goes on to this day, but the people criticizing Graeber for saying incorrect things didn't seem to have any familiarity with that debate or the further research it continues to inspire.

So after seeing that criticism I'm more inclined to give Graeber the benefit of the doubt. He often presents minority academic opinions as he weaves together his grand narratives, but "minority academic opinion" does not mean "wrong".
posted by clawsoon at 4:57 PM on November 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

(Here [PDF] is a reasonable recent summary of the two decades of debate since Pomeranz published The Great Divergence, if anyone is interested in that particular sideline.)
posted by clawsoon at 5:28 PM on November 1, 2021

Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out [ungated] - "A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules—and still could."

“The Dawn of Everything” is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past. Superficially, it resembles other exhaustive, synoptic histories—it’s encyclopedic in scope, with sections introduced by comically baroque intertitles—but it disavows the intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity, the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors’ improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance. The result is an almost hallucinatory vision of the human epic as a series of idiosyncratic digressions. It is the story of how we made it up as we went along—of how things could have been different and, perhaps, still might be.

posted by kliuless at 10:43 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

David Graeber's Possible Worlds - "The Dawn of Everything author left behind countless fans and a belief society could still change for the better."

The quotidian anarchism Graeber saw in his fieldwork was an epiphany he would later work to translate for a wider audience. Anarchism was a matter of “having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions,” he wrote in an essay called “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” He explained that when people waited politely in line to board a bus — waited, that is, even though nobody was making them — they were acting like anarchists...

Graeber had been working on a short essay about COVID that was published after his death. The pandemic was “a confrontation with the actual reality of human life,” he wrote. “Which is that we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated.” Surely it was the moment to stop taking such a state of affairs for granted, he wrote. “Why don’t we stop treating it as entirely normal that the more obviously one’s work benefits others, the less one is likely to be paid for it; or insisting that financial markets are the best way to direct long-term investment even as they are propelling us to destroy most life on Earth?”

posted by kliuless at 7:42 AM on November 13, 2021

The Dawn of Everything Is Not a Book About the Origins of Inequality - "Or, why Rousseau and Hobbes can suck it."

As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:

1. simply aren’t true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly dull.

This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.

posted by kliuless at 10:40 AM on November 13, 2021