Reasons to be cheerful

A book I think you should read, then recommend to your friends, family and random strangers on the street

I try to highlight books or articles in these newsletters, which I think are either the best or newest thing to read on a particular subject, but I am more careful about saying I think people ought to read things. There are three main reasons for this.

1. We’re all busy people with whatever it is we choose or are compelled to be busy about. And in the midst of that frenetic activity, I assume that we all have a list somewhere in our brain that occasionally nags us about things we should be doing. The point of this newsletter isn’t to feed that voice or add to that list.

2. There is too much to read these days. This is a very real and actually pretty interesting challenge, especially for scholars. Once upon a time, not so long ago (i.e. I sort of remember it and people who taught me lived it), it was possible to pick a topic and read everything about it. You still had to pick the right topic. Some were already too big or popular, but there were lots and lots of things about which you could know everything. Being an expert often meant proving that you did know everything about it. (That was a lot of what PhDs traditionally tested.) But now it isn’t. The explosion of universities, publications and publishers worldwide, as well as moves to study topics in more multidisciplinary ways means that it is now pretty much impossible ever to have read everything that is relevant to anything. So, again, I’m not invested in adding to anybody’s functionally infinite ‘to read’ list.

3. You may not like reading books. Lots of people do, but lots of people don’t. So, if one of the reasons you enjoy Coffee with Clio is to find out some of what is going on in the world of history - which, let’s face it, is a pretty book-heavy world - without having to read at length, that is awesome!

(If you do like reading books or articles and would ever like to know more about a particular topic, I’m very happy to share reading recommendations by email or in the comments!)

However, every so often a book comes along that I will recommend. Get the audio-book, read it on your e-reader (that’s what I did), borrow it from your local library or prop up a secondhand paperback on your shelf when you’re done. However you get hold of it, definitely read it. This is one of those.

This is a particularly good time to read it, too, if you’re feeling that the world is in flux, or just quite a stressful place to be.

The cover of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published 2021 by Allen Lane.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was published in 2021, shortly after the early death of one of its two co-authors, anthropologist David Graeber. The book brings together around ten years of reflections by Graeber and David Wengrow, an archaeologist who works mainly on prehistory and global comparative archaeology.

Though it was on my radar for a while, it has taken me a little while to get to The Dawn of Everything. Now I have, I’m a little annoyed (in a good way) at having to rewrite parts of my oh-so-nearly-finished book manuscript, but at the same time, it will make it better.

This is not to say that I agree with everything in The Dawn of Everything and there are most definitely things I want to look into further. As with anything that takes a huge sweep of time and space, immensely complicated things can be passed over in a sentence or two. If they are the thing you personally know well, you notice. The rest of the time, the only way to be sure is to check.

In earlier work by Graeber, it could be frustrating to see simple mistakes of fact alongside brilliant new insights into familiar topics, wonderful turns of phrase and the kind of overstatements of a point that really make you think.

From a lot of the reviews I’ve had a look at of The Dawn of Everything, other people, with different specialisms to mine have felt the same way, but the majority of them also say more or less the same thing I’m saying here: yes, there are issues. Yes, there are some dizzying leaps over really complicated stuff. Yes, some of the claims seem… overstated? Overly optimistic? But this is still one of the most important books about the past you might ever read.

Okay, enough cavilling and insisting. What’s the deal and why should you bother?

Graeber and Wengrow, they explain, set out, around 2010, to answer one of The Big Questions about the past: what are the origins of inequality?

Lots of people have tried to answer this question, from all sorts of perspectives. There are historical, archaeological, philosophical, sociological and anthropological treatises on the subject. And it is a question with pretty obvious and significant relevance for the present and future. If we can figure out where inequality comes from, we may be a step closer to figuring out what to do about it. Indeed, scholarship has generally suggested two basic answers.

One boils down to there being pretty much nothing we can do about it, except maybe go back to living in small family groups, hunting and gathering our food. This is because, suggest these works, people are only capable of treating each other more-or-less equally when we know each other personally and have next-to-nothing to divine up unequally anyway. As soon as we start producing more (e.g. by farming) or living in groups bigger than 100-150 or so, we automatically establish hierarchies and start needing systems of power to make sure everything works smoothly.

The second answer is effectively modification of the first one: if we come up with the right checks and balances, we can gradually make things incrementally better for more people. Basically, we cannot avoid hierarchy and structures of control but we can corect for them by trial and error, using technology, law and better bureaucracy.

What if, Graeber and Wengrow ask, none of this is true? Absolutely none of it, from the ground up? What if it is all made up?

What if even starting with the question ‘what is the origin of inequality’ is a) not really the beginning of the problem and b) not a very helpful thing to do?

Instead, the authors ask, why do we ask this question? And when did we start asking it? As a historian, this was preaching to the choir. Asking when people start asking certain questions or using particular terms or worrying about specific problems is pretty much always a good thing to do, precisely because it forces us to back away from the assumption that any question, term or problem simply is and always has been.

So it proves, in this case. What, after all, is inequality, or equality? Is it everybody being the same, or being treated the same way? And do we really mean in every possible way or just in some ways, and therefore in which ways? These were not novel questions in 2021 or even 2010. Efforts to separate out, for example, concepts like equality and equity, then criticisms of those, have now been around for a while, especially in communities actively trying to address discrimination and lack of inclusion.

This image, produced by the Interaction Institute for Social Change, has come up in my LinkedIn feed a lot over the years, as have modifications of it in which the fence is removed entirely and criticisms of it asking why only these three people have been made to stand behind a fence in the first place. And so on, and so on. My aim here is not to criticise people who are trying to make better worlds or explain problems that many people face in ways that other people who don’t face those problems can understand more easily. However, useful and analytically useful are not necessarily the same thing and equality/equity are analytically pretty tricky.

It also turns out, suggest Graeber and Wengrow, that people have not always worried about this specific issue. Things that now get spoken about in terms of equality have instead been worried about and debated in lots of other terms. People have most definitely talked and written and materially acted about things like  hunger, violence, freedom (and unfreedom), gender distinctions, child-rearing, care for the elderly, disabled, widowed or orphaned. I could go on, but you see the point: there are lots of ways to think about people living full, safe and enjoyable lives, or not being able to do so, which do not invoke the specific idea of ‘inequality’.

Instead, the fixation on inequality developed fairly abruptly in the seventeenth century as a result of critiques of European culture by people met during European exploration, especially of the Americas and Oceania.

What Graeber and Wengrow term ‘the indigenous critique’ can mainly be found in accounts authored by Europeans and the assumption is frequently made that the ‘savages’ in these early modern texts, who are given the role of criticising European society, are simply fictional creations by those European authors, imaginary players in a mind game with church censors and excited European readers.

Why should this assumption be made and what if those critiques really were what indigenous people actually thought? Here, I find myself fully convinced that Graeber and Wengrow are correct in identifying very deep habits of intellectual Eurocentrism in the conventional picture. I am especially convinced because it seems like a case I find myself making as a medievalist: what if we assumed that people in the Middle Ages were as capable, intelligent and curious as us? And why don't we?

The answer in this case is that, alongside Eurocentrism, modern scholarly habits are also deeply modernist. Modern ideas of knowledge have grown out of and fostered the assumption that people from outside Europe and from before the Enlightenment were simply too different from us (in bad ways - too stupid, superstitious, unscientific and preoccupied with their violent, grubby, materially impoverished lives) to have anything useful to say to us.

Now, Graeber and Wengrow do not completely outgrow this themselves. If I have one particular bugbear with the book throughout, it is that, alongside their clarion call to respect and take seriously the choices and ideas of indigenous intellectuals and prehistoric populations (I’ll get to that bit in a moment), they continue to treat people of the European Middle Ages as plodding, ground down, idiot peasants or hysterical inquisitorial fanatics. I suppose it is difficult to do away with bogey men and mythological monsters completely!

Still, that is my crossness as a medievalist and this is not a book about the Middle Ages. It is not even mainly a book about indigenous intellectuals and their interactions with Europeans from the seventeenth century, even if Graeber and Wengrow show that they were generally not too impressed with Europe. They criticised it in particular for the ways in which it systematically excluded, exploited and mistreated some members of society and thereby, Graeber and Wengrow argue, indigenous intellectuals caused a whole tranche of European intellectuals to wonder about these things, too, and thus to begin asking for the first time ‘what are the origins of inequality?’

As I said, though, even this is not really the point of The Dawn of Everything, or is at least only half the point. The core of this book is about distant prehistory, roughly from around 30,000 BCE, with some forays even earlier, to around 1200 CE. (For the later centuries this means, pretty much exclusively, the Americas, where societies were largely non-documentary, and thus knowable primarily through archaeology. These are times that we now know much more about than, say, 30 years ago, and certainly than when theories about how people used to live were developed (e.g. in small hunter-gatherer family bands before farming and cities and states made everything more complex but also more unequal).

One of the things I find most inspiring about this book (again, as a medievalist who frequently makes this plea for the people I study), is Graeber and Wengrow’s insistence that we should imagine people from these many tens of thousands of years of prehistory as smart, funny, playful and capable of thinking hard and seriously about things like how people should treat one another.

Bearing this in mind, and looking at all of the new evidence we now have, the authors ask, is it plausible that for aeons of human existence, people all over the world lived pretty much identical lives, in pretty much identical ways?

The majority of this book is dedicated to delivering a resounding ‘no’. People lived in all kinds of ways, and modern anthropology shows that even modern hunter gatherer societies don’t look much like the model of small, peaceful, egalitarian family groups that we often imagine for distant prehistory.

For example, people began domesticating and farming crops and animals long before they switched to agriculture as a main means of feeding themselves (no ‘agricultural revolution' here!). People lived in cities that contain no traces of temples, palaces or central storehouses. Sometimes people lived in unequal societies and sometimes they stopped and chose to do something else instead.

People defined themselves as being not like their neighbours, a process termed here ‘schismogenesis’, which I find aesthetically unpleasant but immensely useful for a phenomenon I have tried to describe in the Indian Ocean of the first millennium CE.

Moreover, many of these choices can only reasonably be explained as that - choices - rooted in complex reflections on how to be in the world and how to treat others.

There are other brilliant and thought-provoking ideas in this book. Graeber and Wengrow suggest doing away entirely with the concept of ‘state formation’, and even ‘states’ as an analytical term. (That’s the bit I’m having to re-write bits of my own book because of but/because I’m fairly sure they are mostly right). They propose instead a framework that focuses on three core freedoms (to leave, to disobey and to enact different kinds of social relations) and three key forms of dominion (power over violence, power over information and the power of personality or charisma) which are used in various combinations to make people less free.

You don’t have to agree with everything in this book. You don’t even have to trust everything in this book. I don’t, on either count. But reading it felt like having corners of my brain excavated and exposed to the light of day. Why do we think some of these things? What myths and stereotypes do we carry so deeply that we hardly even think about them? How do these myths and assumptions trap us in the belief that things really can’t be very much different from how they are?

Every historian I know has spent at least a bit of time thinking about why we do what we do. Lots of us think about it a lot. Why does it matter? Is it enough that lots of people, us included, demonstrably find the past interesting?

The best answer I’ve ever been able to come up with is that understanding the past gives us an insight into the creativity and possibility of all of the millions of people who have gone before us. It offers us more than any one person, or culture or moment in time could ever imagine or create alone. It shows us that things have not always been the way they are.

The Dawn of Everything paints that message across an enormous swathe of time and space and pushes it harder to drive home the optimistic and hopeful message that we have always been capable of creating our own societies and of recreating them not accidentally or haphazardly, but intentionally because we are, and always have been, creatures with the inherent capacity to imagine better worlds.

And isn’t that something worth believing?