David Graber, an anthropologist, and David Wengrow’s, an archeologist, book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”, is more than ‘just’ a history of humanity, which would on its own suggest a massive tome of thousands of pages. it is an examination of how we ‘do’ history drawing many examples of peoples and societies across time from the Paleolithic through the colonization of North America. It is not simple reportage, rather a look into the correctness or accuracy, of how we have been telling history. I enjoy such questions and their capacity to rock the academic and intellectual ‘boat’. My reading has spurred the formation of links to two other books I’ve read recently, Stephen Jay Gould’s, “The Burgess Shale” and Pekka Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent”. All three of these call into question previously widely accepted thinking on their subjects. More than this, they question foundational ideas upon which the science they examine are founded. This appeals to me. But more than this, there is an idea central to them all which really rings ‘true’ for me.

Paleontology, Gould’s forte, American History Hamalainen’s, Graber’s, anthropology and Wengrow’s, archeology are all sciences, which Gould described as ‘historical sciences’, not ‘hard’ sciences like chemistry and physics. The ‘hard sciences’ are those forms in which the ‘scientific method’, was originally devised. In it experiments are devised for study in the lab, broken down and repeated time and again to determine the validity of one’s ‘idea’ or hypothesis. These ‘softer’ sciences examine questions that occurred in history and are non-repeatable. My first degree is in sociology, another one of these ‘social’ sciences, that can’t really be removed from their ‘context’, broken down and examined to get a definitive and reproducible answer. Gould explains these differences far more effectively than I can. These sciences rely on close description and careful comparison. One of the major takeaways from Gould’s book for me was his idea of contingency, that what happens is contingent upon what preceded it. Change one variable and your confidence in the outcome goes out the window. Same goes with taking a ‘second’ sample. There are simply too many variables which a scientist in the historical sciences cannot ‘control’ for. Again, there are far too many variables. What follows after that becomes even far less predictable. An event that happened in one place and time will not produce the same outcome or effect in another. Basically every situation, every moment, is unique, making the outcome impossible to accurately predict with confidence. This is the nature of complex, dynamic, systems.

Prediction aside, this also makes it very difficult to explain past events. One can, and we do, tailor our answers to fit. They can superficially feel ‘correct’…but they can be very far off of the mark. It is very difficult to understand which factors are decisive in either maintaining stasis or in pushing a ‘system’ towards a particular change. The interactions and relations are incredibly complex and, essentially non-repeatable. Our biases, intentional or not, shape the stories we tell about the past. When we pick and choose from the historical record, and, really, we have no choice but to do this, our bias begins to reshape what we can tell. Our choices then redefine the past, fitting it to our expectations if we are not very careful. We are especially likely to do this when we view past actors as simpler, more limited than ourselves. We are prone to redefining the past. We can easily fall into the trap of looking for supporting information and disregarding that which doesn’t ‘fit’ our ‘preferred’ explanation.

Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent” is an attempt to retell the story of the colonization and creation of present day North America, shifting it away from the Eurocentric perspective of the occupiers to the natives who proceeded them by several thousands of years. As youths and students we were taught the history of the ‘heroic’ colonists fighting off the violent natives and next to nothing about their diverse cultures that thrived here prior to our arrival and the introduction of what Jared Diamond refers to as the forces of guns, germs and steel wielded by the colonists. The natives are dismissed as ‘savages’, presented as a meaningless footnote in the process of ours becoming a great nation. Hamalainen attempts to more fully describe the hundreds of peoples and their cultures, telling something of their politics and the long practice of diplomacy they historically used effectively to settle conflicts, establish relations and mediate between peoples. He describes them as the dominant power on the continent for nearly 400 years, attributing much of the success of the Europeans and colonists to them, and certainly ‘helping’ ‘shape’ of the new country, to the natives. He argues that European and colonial success was limited by the power of the natives. In such a conflict of politics and culture, Hamalainen writes of the dominance and prowess of native peoples, suggesting that were it not for our diseases, there may have been a very different outcome as the French, English and Spanish worked to their own advantage, their home countries deeply enmeshed in their own struggles back home in Europe, the colonists acting in a rash, often uncoordinated manner, supported inconsistently by a young government without the needed assets, power, commitment or even a coherent and consistent plan. Even given the disease factor, Hamalainen, argues that indigenous people won innumerable battles against the colonists. Natives were capable of orchestrating and coordinating great violence in the defense of their claim to the land and their ways of life, while the colonists, driven by greed and their disdain for ‘savages’, willingly slaughtered them whenever their interests came into conflict, non-combatants and warriors/soldiers alike. At best the colonists effort were uncoordinated and conceived with little strategic thought which was exacerbated by their ignorance of the geography of the ‘contested’ lands. In general native people’s way of life, their cultures, there understanding of this place they lived, were in direct, and powerful, opposition to that of the Europeans, and colonists, who were more of an amorphous mass, whereas the Native’s strategies and actions presented a far more thoroughly considered defense of their homelands and ways of life.

In ‘The Dawn of Everything’, the authors, call out our commonly accepted understanding of the past and our idea that ‘civilization’ has followed a predictable pattern of advancement, that we now sit atop a pinnacle in a linear history, presumably, which will continue to the next stage. The particulars of our ‘civilization’, are widely viewed as an inevitability. Ours is a golden age of innovation while the past, especially those thousands of years of Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures, were largely stagnant, with punctuated ‘moments’ when innovations burst upon the scene, revolutionizing all to follow, e.g., the development of metallurgy, ceramics, agriculture, which we are quick to claim, were broadly adopted as superior to the past practice of hunting and gathering societies, and all of the hardship such lives must have entailed…or did it? These innovations are claimed to have spurred changes in social, political and economic structures which were ‘inevitable’, the appearance of cities, the ‘state’, sovereigns, priesthoods, bureaucracy, hierarchical structure, police and war. In fact, the authors point out, with one example after another, that the historical reality did not follow this singular, inevitable, path. The authors effectively undermine all of this, showing how these things were anything but inevitable. The changes that did occur were adopted over centuries, or even thousands of years, not wholly and completely, with a companion rejection of previous ways of life. In many cases these were adopted only in part and perhaps latter rejected. They point out how we have favored those examples in history, claiming and and arguing that in so many cases political and social realities were far more fluid. Cultures were dynamic and didn’t follow any particular patterns.

They begin their book with significant questions and an examination of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in France questioning the foundation upon which historians have returned time and again, where and how did inequality in the world come about? How had inequality become such a factor in so much of contemporary life? Historians began to see inequality as an inevitable development of the progress to cities, in our hierarchical organization and the ‘state’ which they tied to the development and practice of agriculture, which they saw at the root of the development of the social structures of modern life. For the authors such questions seem to miss the point. What do they serve? What would their answers even mean? These questions have shaped the way we look at history and the authors build a case throughout their book that these driving questions may be the wrong ones. They do this first by looking into what has become known as the Native Americans critique of European life. European intellectuals had become fascinated by the popularized idea of Native Americans in Europe at the time. Stories had been circulating from reports, often produced by missionaries, who had gone there to convert the savages. While offering a view into native life, the missionaries certainly brought their own biases as they observed, evaluated and wrote. 

American indigenous cultures, overall, highly valued the concept of individual liberty and its ‘sister’ value of mutual aid. Most native peoples ‘governed’ themselves without a powerful sovereign. In those few cases where there was one, their powers were strictly limited. Agreement had to be gained through discussion, argument and consensus building and they apparently spent a lot of time doing so. People often including the women, were valued and recognized in the process. Members were accorded this right to selfhood. The hoarding of wealth was frowned upon and those who possessed it generally gained status by giving it away. In fact there was generally an obligation to do so, something expected for the well being of the larger group. In most cases native people of the times recognized no superior class which could order the compliance of others. Indigenous Americans were staunchly against such a practice and the abrogation of their rights as a free people. They saw such a practice as an inexcusable breach of individual liberty. 

At the same time they were driven by the concept of mutual aid, caring for one’s people, which were established through long lines of kinship, determined not just be blood, but also by a kind of adoption, the inclusion of those who commit to the whole. There were an broader connections based on clans which went across village or tribal lines, enabling individuals to freely travel and receive support often from those they had never met. When the French attempted to implement these ideas into old Europe, they missed this and instead emphasized the element of equality, but natives would have never seen it this way. The French then railed against the inequality of their own culture and times. In France, the insistence on equality, seemed to lead to the violence and bloodshed against their peers, fellow citizens and ‘superiors’. Lost on them were the concepts of personal self-determination, the freedom of movement, the capacity and ‘right’ to disobey authority and to make whatever association one so chose. Equality was not an issue for Native Americans. They were unique and valued individuals. These relationships for Native peoples did not, however, dissolve the differences between competing tribes and confederacies that would form from time to time.

When several Iroquoian-speaking peoples, among them a man named Kandiaronk, were captured and taken to France, in one of France’s failed attempts to pacify Natives  on the lands they were attempting to claim for themselves, Europeans were fascinated. The Natives were shocked by and extremely critical of life in Europe, France in particular, a life where people were trapped in the positions of their birth leading squalid lives, where there was a vast gulf between the masses and the wealthy and the wealthy were capable of exercising power over many aspects of the less powerful’s lives. They were aghast at how French people would treat other French people. This was a violation of three of the things they found central to life: the ability for an individual to pick up and move at any time; their implicit right to disobey any order as a violation of one’s self; and their ability to form whatever associations or relationships one might choose for themselves. These were absolutely novel concepts in France at the time. How could such ‘savages’ have evolved such a sophisticated polity? When European philosophers and political thinkers quickly adopted some version of these, they missed much of what was essential, which shaped the French Revolution and its particularly violent and bloody outcome. This is a simplification, but the authors point here is to jar us from our complacency of thinking. Ideas and themes are not transferable directly from one society to another.

The authors continue through their book to emphasize how there was no one pattern, social ‘evolution’ did not follow a singular, and inevitable, line. Change has always been dynamic and variable. They write of the concept of sovereign power, the control of violence, which grants the sovereign, the state, sole power over life; bureaucracy, the control of information and the administrative ‘arm’ of the sovereign; and the dependence of selecting leaders based on individual charisma. These they see as key elements of the modern state. They examine how historians have combed through the past to find examples to support the formation of the modern state from these blocks. In reality, however, the authors show that the occurrence of all three of these are a relative rarity. More often than not societies were structure around any one or two of these and after a number of years, may have been rejected, before returning to a form less centralized, consisting of some kind of arrangement of local ‘councils’ which emphasized the freedoms and obligations described as common among many North American Natives of the 17th and 18th centuries. Insisting that this concept of the modern state as a tool to evaluate past societies, misses the mark and dismisses much of what has occurred. Sovereign power refers to the power to order and command ones people, even to claiming the singular right to demand the life of one’s citizens. By bureaucracy they refer to the organizational structure that carries out the orders, demands and laws of its leaders while controlling information. Charismatic politics refers to the selection of one’s leaders based on an individual’s charisma and introduces the possibility of empowering an individual with little regard for the good of one’s people.

The authors describe many examples across time which turn out to be exceptions, which beg the question and strongly implies that we are looking in the wrong direction.

Societies evolve uniquely. There is an element of the same kind of contingency, Gould wrote of this in his book, “The Burgess Shale”, in operation here. Each moment in time begins from a unique starting point, looks at a different population living in different circumstances with varying resource limits and histories. The authors spend much of the end of their book examining the examples of North America’s indigenous people. With hundreds’ of languages spoken by several million people across the continent, over several thousand years, much of the earliest of which requires the use of non-written, archeological findings, suggests that, across North America many or most peoples came to reject the formal structures that Europeans keep looking for. This is not to say that such peoples were some ideal expression of human possibilities, but they were unique and had much to share, if we could set aside our prejudices and preferences and do an honest examination.

This book raises many questions of how we tell our history and suggests how our insistence on its historic, linearly evolving, limited rightness sets us up for continued problems. Our failure to understand the past can only weaken us going forward. As people of a ‘modern’ society to continue this way requires that we double down on centralized power and the control of information, that the state exert itself, limiting those same three elements many peoples have historically valued. When the past is revealed and it is in conflict with the understood history, it requires ever more energy and investment into reinforcing the weakened ‘lie’ of the promoted history. It creates a cognitive dissonance in us and we can continue on only by rejecting one or the other through either suppression of ‘alternative’ versions or education and understanding. Insistence on one true story requires the suppression of all others. This is exactly where we are stuck today and we’re becoming even more entrenched and limited. This creates so much conflict which plays out on a very large, human and potentially violent scale.

In the study of history we should study context scrupulously. Contingency, where did we begin? What factors are in play? What are the defining relationships? What comparables in history are available? What can we determine from them? Did we miss something? Because this resulted under these conditions in this place, can we say that the same will happen here, with different, though similar people in this other place and time? What is served by doing so? Can we afford to ignore the lessons of the past?

When we bring too much with us to the study of such things we risk the real possibility that we will get it wrong. As in so many other studies it is safer to assign probabilities rather than search for definitive answers or ‘shop’ for evidence that will corroborate our position, beginning from what is safe and expected. When doing so we risk falling into patterns and and making assumptions which are wrong, misleading and damaging.Our goal should instead be to simply understand.

One of the other lessons of their book is that throughout these earlier ages people were actively engaged in their lives. The stereotypical ‘noble savage’ never existed. That was an imposed idea. Earlier peoples weren’t necessarily simple, dull and unmotivated. History was not a bland or blind recycling of lives, time after time repeating patterns, until one of those trigger events suddenly and irrevocably changed their lives before entering another long period of complacency. The record shows that change has always been dynamic and variable. People made ‘discoveries’, many of the important ones by women, and then choose to adopt the resulting ideas and technologies at various scales. It is believed that many technological innovations such as in ceramics and metallurgy were used for generations in simple ways, perhaps only decorative, or as ways to augment the old which people were comfortable with. Change for change’s sake is a modern development. Fashion was a matter of personal and communal choice. It wasn’t driven by those higher up in a hierarchy looking to profit. Archeology supports the idea that the goals of life were very different. We were not driven to continuously advance. All of the components which comprised our daily lives drove our decisions. The archeological record instead shows the plasticity, adaptability and creativity of early peoples throughout their lives. There was, anthropologists argue, a ‘playfulness’ involved in life, for much of time characterized by a degree of freedom to learn, to try on new ideas, social forms, to adopt ‘pieces’ of new technologies and fit them into their own lives. The dominant empires of Egypt, those early dynasties of China, the Aztecs and Incas, the Mesopotamians were exceptions, in a sense, ‘cherry picked’ by historians to fit their ideas of a social and political evolution. On closer examination even those were not quite what they are often presented as. 

Rigid social, political and economic forms seem to be far more of a factor in our lives today than at any time in the past. The authors argue that such charge is much closer to our lives today than it ever was during the thousands of years of prehistory. We are ‘trained’ to submit to authority. We accept the limits to our access to knowledge, the manipulation of its release and actively reject other social, political and economic alternatives. The book describes many societies and periods in which these ‘freedoms’, to move when and where one chooses, to disobey authorities who would order you to do that which you don’t want and the ability to associate with those you choose without censure or punishment, were commonplace. Successful societies always contained some measure of mutual aid, because a society defined by relentless competition at every level cannot long stand. Mutual agreement and support are a necessity. Technologies drive us today. We are locked into a continuous drive toward ‘improvement’, change, increased efficiency and convenience, without ever really considering its purpose or the end game. In the past people were more likely to reject that chosen by others for them, at least without considerable discussion and consideration. This is likely due at least in part to the fact that modern societies and governments are far more powerful, in terms of the conduct of our individual lives, than they were then, combined with the control of information today. This ‘information’ is often ‘confused’. It often is intend to serve the goals of those ‘producing’ it. At least before it moves out and takes on a life of its own and meaning, truth and value become just so many other words, becoming casualties of our time. What was initially chosen for us by political strategists, arbiters and trend setters begins to drown us in its shear volume and incomprehensibility. We have surrendered much of the controls individuals across history largely claimed for themselves and we have lost a vital link to one another.

Multiple examples of earlier societies existed which put to lie the inevitability of a top down, command, hierarchical government, strictly limiting choice and life. Population size and technology, have not driven us down an inevitable pathway, into avstrictly hierarchical world, power ever more concentrated at the top, managed by rigid rules, limited choices and harsh enforcement. These are choices. There are societies which were stable over periods of hundreds of years that were organized on far more humane scales, not always related by blood, but thoughtfully organized on scales people were comfortable with, councils comprised of neighbors and peers with a rotating composition, without the power to demand, charged with the responsibility of the larger groups ‘care’, assuring that none went without, in which members were valued.

Today many of our leaders are attempting to seize and wield the power of the ‘state’ to punish those they are in conflict with, authoritarian states, sowing division everywhere. They claim this an acceptable ‘price’ in a modern society as they completely ignore the very foundation of what a society is, people living in relationship with one another for the purpose of mutual shared benefit. They violate the very liberties they claim as so important to themselves failing to understand that no state, no social organization can long stand that relies on such a division of class, rights and freedoms. Social stability is directly, and inversely related to, the amount of energy/violence required to maintain such a system. Such leaders support and promote violence and then deny responsibility. They speak of ‘their’ people in a very limited, exclusionary sense. This is ‘governance’, if we can call it that, with an absolute denial of the concepts of ‘mutual support’ which underpins most so called primitive societies. Societies in which resources and supports are shared so that if the community is healthy, all of its members share. These are the same ‘errors’ valued by the Iroquoian speakers, the authors began with, so called ‘primitive’ peoples. It was pre-Enlightenment France and Europe of the mid-18th century that the Kandiaronk and other natives were so shocked by, with its rigid social roles, poverty and violence committed against one’s own people and neighbors. Authoritarians argue that God and history are on their side, that their’s is the correct history, but their’s is a direct denial of the actual historical record.

Wengrow, sadly, in the introduction writes of how, his writing partner, Graber, died three weeks after completing writing this book….They had had plans for two more. This one had taken them some ten years of what often turned out to be daily collaboration. It would be impossible to simply select another anthropologist to complete the ‘series’. Nevertheless, I look forward to Wengrow’s next book.