The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, may be the most important book written in the last century. That’s because its authors did something extremely valuable: they surveyed recent research into Stone Age societies, then used it to identify the social arrangements that have historically worked best for us humans.
The book is especially important because it conveys a crucial fact: if we adhere to these social arrangements going forward, we can avoid many of the recurring problems that have plagued our species since the dawn of civilization.
Summarizing the book
When the authors of The Dawn of Everything looked at the last 50,000 years of human history, they were surprised by what they found. They saw that, as they put it,“The world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms.”
The book is mostly about those Stone Age political forms. They were unknown until the past couple of decades, which means that we civilized people have long been creating our political structures based on incomplete information.
We knew about the earliest civilizations. We were familiar with the empires of antiquity. We were, however, in the dark about tribal Stone Age societies. That is, the societies we homo sapiens have lived in for 90% of our history.
Now we know much more about these societies, and the authors pass that knowledge on. Every decision-maker in America should read the book, but since not many will do that, here’s a summary of the social experiments it describes:
- There is no perfect society, no utopia. People are people, so no matter what our social arrangements are, problems and disagreements will arise.
- We humans are socially creative. Our social arrangements are a matter of choice. There’s no “natural” kind of society—there has always been variation.
- People prefer living in tribal societies. People prefer to live in tribal societies, because they foster stronger social bonds than modern societies do.
- Decentralizing political power is key. We can preserve our freedom while living in large groups if we make sure that political power is decentralized.
Distilling the essence of Stone Age life
The Dawn of Everything focuses on the Late Stone Age–the last 50,000 years of human history in which modern humans emerged.
During this time, we began to do things that earlier humans hadn’t. We began making art, music, and advanced tools of stone and bone. We began to move all over the globe. Most importantly, we began living in groups larger than a small nomadic band, and began organizing ourselves into tribes.
Since the tribe is the socio-political form that we modern humans have employed for 90% of our history, it’s what the book focuses on. Looking at tribes at all periods of history, and from all over the globe, it makes these observations:
- Tribal life is complex and sophisticated. Social arrangements in tribal societies are complex and sophisticated. So are the tribal people who create and maintain them.
- Tribal people nip hoarding in the bud. Tribal societies preserved individual freedom by preventing ambitious men from hoarding wealth and buying power.
- Tribal people see us as rude and selfish. Tribal people see the members of modern societies as self-centered people who treat their children and neighbors badly.
Stone Age cultures: varied, sophisticated
For us modern humans, there has never been an “original” or “natural” social arrangement. People living in tribal societies have always had very different lifestyles and values.
For example, the !Kung people of South Africa were easy-going, and didn’t care much for personal possessions. People in the Yurok tribe of Northern California, by contrast, worked very hard to accumulate shell money.
Many Stone Age peoples created “hybrid” societies that blended hunting with horticulture, and featured social structures that changed with the seasons:
- During the dry season, the Nambikwara of Brazil lived in small bands run by authoritarian leaders. During the rainy season, they gathered in large villages where crops were grown and government was by consensus.
- The Inuit of the Arctic had a similarly flexible society, in that they dispersed into small bands led by a single elder during the summer, and congregated in large, cooperatively-governed meeting houses during the winter.
Far-flung clans provided Stone Age people with social support. For instance, if someone left their Beaver Clan village, they could travel hundreds of miles and be accepted by people of that same clan in a different tribe. Even if they didn’t speak the language, they’d be given food and shelter, and a place in the tribe if they were well-liked.
Outsiders of other kinds were valued, such as “prophets” who spoke in tongues, went into trances, and/or cross-dressed. These people weren’t condemned, but rather treated with respect. In tough times and unexpected circumstances, the tribes turned to them for insight, foresight, guidance, and even leadership, with consistently good results.
A sophisticated tribe: the Osage
The book goes into depth describing one Stone Age tribe, the Osage. The tribe arose in the Ohio River valley around 800 B.C., then moved west when its territory was invaded. It provides a good example of the sophistication typical of Stone Age people, in that the tribe independently generated Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king, which it used in a system of representative government.
The Osage studied nature closely, and concluded that its animating force was unknowable. They did determine, however, that it operated through a combination of two principles, Sky and Earth. Wanting their society to reflect this universal order, they divided their society into a Sky clan and an Earth clan, in which the men from one clan took their wives from the other.
Every member of the tribe was expected to spend an hour a day in prayer, but some members were especially dedicated to spiritual practice. These members sought initiation into the levels of spirituality recognized by the Osage. Those who attained the highest levels were known as the Nohozhinga, or “little old men” (some of whom were women). The Nohozhinga met daily to discuss natural philosophy, political issues, and affairs of state.
The Nohozinga was the decision-making body of the tribe, and kept an oral history of its most important discussions. When it failed to reach consensus on a question concerning the nature of the universe, or how it related to the tribe’s affairs, two of its members would go into the wilderness to meditate on the question. Then they would return with a report. Once the Nohozhinga made a decision for the tribe, their decision was enforced by the warriors.
Stone Age people chose their lives
People of the Stone Age chose the ways they lived. That is, they could have lived one way, but chose to live another. The people who built the Neolithic Çatalhöyük settlement in Turkey, for example, domesticated sheep and goats, but not cattle or pigs. Why? Because they enjoyed hunting wild cattle and boar. In the same way, Pacific Coast tribes were familiar with agriculture, but rejected the idea of planting staple crops.
Stone Age people also developed complicated governments. The Osage, for example, thought of their history as a series of crises in which elders worked out the bugs in the previous political arrangement. What the Osage ended up with was a government based on checks and balances: its two clans each had 24 bands, and every band had a representative, so their “legislature” had two “houses” with 48 total representatives.
People in the Stone Age experimented with kingdoms such as that of Cahokia, a city of 20,000 people that existed around a thousand years ago near what is now St. Louis. The city was ruled by a monarch, but over time its citizens “voted with their feet” and drifted away to live somewhere else. When the kingdom lost all power and the monarch was gone, the site was resettled, but with towns that held many fewer people, and had egalitarian governments.
How Stone Age tribes stayed free
Freedom was the cardinal virtue in most Stone Age societies. As one Jesuit priest said about the Wendat tribe of Canada in 1644:
“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they…so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except insofar as each is pleased to submit to them.“
Since freedom was so important to Stone Age people, preserving it was their political priority. Their members knew that as people live in larger groups, the potential for a wealthy and ambitious person to control other people increases. So, they created customs to keep such people from hoarding personal wealth.
At the level of a 25-150-person band, food was wealth, so band members would “insult the meat,” downplaying the achievements of successful hunters to keep them humble. In most bands, the meat was distributed by someone chosen at random, to ensure that everyone got their fair share. To keep the band cohesive, braggarts and bullies were ridiculed, shamed, and in extreme cases even killed.
At the level of a 2000-person seasonal gathering, or a collection of fishing villages, preserving freedom meant enforcing generosity. In the Nootka tribe, for example, a chief was expected to give away most of his wealth in a ceremony known as a potlatch. He was born with high social rank, but to maintain it, he had to be generous to the people of his tribe. Selfish chiefs were sometimes killed by their people, but generous ones were praised and lauded.
It’s worth noting that freedom was for the members of one’s own tribe. Many tribes raided and took slaves. Within one’s tribe, however, freedom meant more than freedom of action. It also meant freedom from want. No one was allowed to go hungry, not because people feared poverty themselves, but because they preferred living in a society where no one was poor.
The earliest cities preserved freedom
The book points out that personal freedom was preserved in the world’s earliest cities. Unlike Cahokia, cities such as Uruk in Mesopotamia had egalitarian governments that echoed the politics of nomadic tribes. For example, everyone in Uruk, including the king, did manual labor on public works projects. Rulers and priests worked right alongside shepherds and farmers.
In Uruk, neighborhood assemblies held most of the power, and the ruler of the city had to abide by their decisions. These assemblies included both women and men, and participated in making public policy, from taxation to foreign relations. These assemblies also governed the people of their neighborhoods day-to-day, holding trials and adjudicating disputes.
It was only after a warrior aristocracy arose in what is now Turkey, around 3000 BC, that city governments began to change from egalitarian to authoritarian. In the first cities, the people who lived in them basically governed themselves.
The earliest farms were egalitarian
Humans turned to farming as a last resort, when the climate was dry, and where resources were scarce. That’s because growing crops involves very hard work. Building soil, clearing forests, weeding, etc.–these things involve much more work than hunting and gathering, so no one in the Stone Age did them by choice. That’s why, for around 3000 years after it appeared, farming was a secondary part of the food-procurement mix, less important than hunting or foraging.
It’s no surprise, then, that the earliest farming communities were organized along the same lines as hunter-gatherer bands. Land was held communally, and distributed according to the number of people in a family, or by lottery. This was the case in Europe during the Late Stone Age, and it persisted in the form of the Anglo-Saxon rundale and the Russian mir.
Life in these early farming communities, while easy and free compared to serfdom, still wasn’t as attractive as hunting and gathering. So, when people in the Americas had a choice, they chose the latter. In the Southwest, for example, people gradually farming and returned to foraging. By the time the Spaniards arrived, the once-prevalent farming societies had shrunk to isolated pockets of farmers, surrounded by hunter-gatherers.
Stone Age societies meet Europeans
In the New World, modern societies with advanced technology (sailing ships, clocks) encountered a continent inhabited by Stone Age tribes. What did the indigenous people think of the new arrivals from Europe? Not much. Members of the Mi’kmaq tribe said about the French:
“You are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves. We live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other. You are thieves and deceivers. You are covetous, neither generous nor kind.”
The French, for their part, were annoyed by the Mi’kmaq, who constantly told them that they were richer than the French because they were more generous, and had easier lives.
People of the Wendat tribe also commented on the French settlers’ lack of generosity. As one of the settlers put it:
“They considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”
The Wendat also thought the French to be rude. While the French monk Gabriel Sagard, who learned the Wendat language, considered Wendat speakers to be polite and persuasive, the Wendat thought the opposite of the French. They noted how the French often cut each other off in conversation and employed weak arguments.
The Baron de Lahontan, one of the first Europeans to arrive in “New France,” remarked how the native tribes:
“Were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There’s no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society: they make a joke of anything you say on that account.
“They scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the difference of ranks which is observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man—the king—who possesses all the power…”
The voice of a very different society
In The Dawn of Everything, a Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk features prominently. One Jesuit historian wrote about him that, “No Indian had ever possessed greater merit, a finer mind, more valor, prudence, or discernment.”
Kandiaronk was also a political philosopher, and argued that his tribe’s decisions to forsake the two main features of Western civilization—a legal code and fungible money—made Wendat society superior to that of the French.
He told the Baron de Lahontan that a legal system wasn’t an integral part of a complex society, but rather an impediment to a harmonious society. He said:
“You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another… We are determined not to have laws, because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.”
Whereas Saint Paul said that the love of money is the root of all evil, Kandiaronk went further, and said that money itself is a source of great evil:
“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. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?”
Kandiaronk told the Baron that if he adopted an American way of life, he’d be much happier. It might take him a while to adjust, but in the end he’d have a better quality of life. Many Europeans agreed with Kandiaronk: the vast majority of settlers who lived in both European and Indian societies chose to live in the latter. Many settlers “went native” and lived among the Indians, but almost no Indians went the other way to live in settler communities.
Those settlers “went native” for a couple of reasons. The first is that Indian societies offered them much more social mobility. Europeans taken in by Indian families often rose to prominent positions within their tribes, and some even became chiefs. The more important reason, however, was the strong social bonds they found within the tribes. They found much more mutual care and social support in the tribes than they did in European societies.
New possibilities present themselves
Wendat society was based upon very different principles than that of the Europeans, and those principles are available to us. If we want to structure our society along those lines, say the authors of The Dawn of Everything, we can do that. They invite us to explore new possibilities for living in old ways:
“Perhaps if our species does endure…aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies—say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale, cities governed by neighborhood councils, or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction—will seem like the really significant breakthroughs.
“After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales, to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia.
“It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about…“