Alexander Hamilton asked if people are truly capable of governing themselves by reflection and choice or if they are, instead, doomed to be buffeted by the whims of accident and force. Jill Lepore made it the organizing question of her 800-page history of the United States, These Truths. David Graeber and David Wengrow argue emphatically for choice in their 500-page history of humanity, The Dawn of Everything. They argue against not accident and force but the immutable laws of history, the stages of human development, that limit our thinking. Further, they argue that humans exhibit choice in more than constitutional government. They find evidence in the archaeological record for choice in social relations and economic systems, as well. We are freer than we think. Graeber and Wengrow’s lens is wide angle to Lepore’s (relative) zoom. The scope of each work is so radically different that it may be wrong to say they are concerned with the same question.
Graeber and Wengrow never mention Civilization and Its Discontents, but they might as well have. I remember encountering Freud’s slim book in college and finding it revelatory. If Freud was too-consumed by sex, so was I: twenty-years-old, horny as hell, and no clear way of satisfying my urges. But the broader themes resonated, too. Civilization comes with a cost. We repress more than sexual urges in the name of an orderly society. This quickly became a truism for me–and I am not alone. Even among the most well-informed in the academy, Graeber and Wengrow insist, the notion persists that societal complexity requires the giving up of freedoms. The agricultural revolution led to the rise of private property, private property promoted social hierarchies, social hierarchies required laws and enforcement to preserve those hierarchies. It is a devil’s bargain we entered into ineluctably and one we are stuck with. At least, that is the assumption that undergirds almost every work in the authors’ fields, anthropology and archaeology. Their book is an attempt to blast this assumption out of the water.
The book starts, inevitably, with Rousseau and Hobbes. Their opposing concepts of the State of Nature not only instigated one of the most significant debates of the Enlightenment, they continue to affect our thinking to this day–with pernicious results, in Graeber and Wengrow’s view. Yet the authors do more than critique. In a detailed historical analysis, they show how Native Americans influenced the Enlightenment discussion from the first, not only on the state of nature, but in the nature of good government, freedom, and equality. They call it the indigenous critique of the European (Western) civilization. The bulk of their evidence comes from a seventeenth century anthology, Jesuit Relations of New France, from which they cite several block quotations, including this one from Father Jerome Lallement:
From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them. [44]
The American “savages” provided more than an example of state-of-nature freedom. They provided models of “reasoned debate,” from which they found “a form of pleasurable activity in [its] own right.” This allows the authors to make a yet more provocative claim:
…it appears to have been exactly this form of debate–rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone–which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with rejection of arbitrary authority…. [46]
This is heady stuff. Maybe “Eurocentrism” really has distorted our view of history in a major way even if, near the end of the book, the authors qualify their earlier implications:
No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it’s possible, perhaps, to imagine some future, non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd. [473]
American civilizations at Cahokia and Natchez, Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, the Pacific Northwest and northern California feature in the book, as do others in America, Mesopotamia, Nilotic Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia, and China. The explication is detailed and complex: a cumulative rebuttal of a simplified stages-of-development view of human history. Instead, they show how “human beings have spent most of the last 40,000 years or so moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again.” [112] One of the main mechanisms they identify for all this flexibility is play.
Technologies, those supposed drivers of human history, were often developed for as art or ritual before they were put to practical or economic use. The authors point to examples of ceramics, mining, steam power, and gunpowder as evidence. “The zone of ritual play,” they say, has been a “scientific laboratory” and a “repertory of knowledge”–and not just for technology but “as a site of social experimentation.” [500-501] Graeber and Wengrow mention many examples of play kings, or playing at kingship. The trappings were present, but real power was absent. These play kings or chiefs or big men may have been primus inter pares, they may have garnered ritualized respect, but no one felt obliged to do what they said. This unintuitive fact allows Graeber and Wengrow to muse: “the real puzzle is not when chiefs or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court. [133] (We have play monarchs again today. See Queen Elizabeth II.)
There is precedent for choice and experimentation. Our ancestors were more free than we have thought–the authors identify three essential elements to freedom: to move or relocate, to ignore or disobey commands, to shape new social realities–so we, today, may not be as stuck as we think. Graeber and Wengrow caution us to resist reductive thinking, to reject the truism that greater population and social complexity necessitates greater hierarchy and social control. They saw no such cause-and-effect evident in the archaeological and anthropological record. On the contrary they found that our distant ancestors “moved regularly back and forth” between different social and economic systems, even as “nowadays most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative…order would be like.” [502]
Graeber and Wengrow are convincing. They are thorough in their mastery of the record, and they are scrupulous about qualifying assertions that bleed toward speculation or that are partially contradicted by the record. But have they really debunked the “stubborn misconception” that scaling up requires sacrificing freedom? In the distant past, villages scaled up to towns scaled up to cities. Today’s scales may, in fact, be qualitatively different when the entire habitable surface of the earth is populated, when we appear to be close to filling the petri dish. The authors acknowledge the non-reproducibility of history, but are they ignoring it in this case? Does the distant past represent a kind of Cambrian Explosion, a proliferation of social forms followed by a winnowing to a narrower range? We don’t have to be talking about hard and fast laws of history to recognize that historical change can entail the types and frequency of change itself.
That said, it is clear to me that Graeber and Wengrow are onto something big. First, our understanding of the past has likely been seriously wrong. That misunderstanding has surely distorted our understanding of the present and limited our ability to imagine better futures. But choice is available, they argue, as long as we can overcome our false notions and our atrophied imaginations. If not, we will remain slaves to accidents of history and the force of increasingly depersonalized bureaucracies and increasingly unaccountable and powerful individuals.
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