Humans at Play in: The Dawn of Everything
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity; seems like the first work of anthropology with an ironic title. Since, The Dawn of Everything, primarily exposes just how varied and self-possessed much of ancient human history actually was. Everything really does mean everything — and where a certain Rousseauian fairy tale about the origins of inequality and societies “rushing headlong for our chains” presupposes a narrative where many authors/academics take for granted that everything leading up to this has been inevitable.
It’s delicious to hear our authors Graeber and Wengrow (the Davids) needle Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. A book recommended by the world’s moms (or at least my mother. Who, though I love, is really not capable of taking on much cognitive dissonance) a book which I flipped through baffled by its accolades. Each page of Sapiens said nothing that wasn’t already in some lexicon of common sense — the absolutely lamest position for any writer to take.
The Davids, by contrast, have produced an anthropological text of layered complexity. On first pass deceptively simple. For it is a book that takes its time with the points it wants to make. More than half the information presented is academic archaeological data, which I wouldn’t blame many modern people for being bored by. You can hardly convince some people what happened 200 years ago was interesting or relevant, forget about 20,000 or 120,000.
But for anyone willing to invest in obscurity for a token of enlightenment, the results are curious and still very much of relevance. The main course of the book — which is essentially a reassessment on the origins of inequality and the standard narrative that agriculture was the culprit, the first deciders who put stakes around a piece of land and declared “this is mine” — the book dives into a much more complex vision of how farming began. With a gentle smile they point out that Harari’s vision of how wheat may have domesticated humans (“if wheat didn’t like stones humans must move them, if wheat was thirsty it needed humans to bring it water.”) is nothing more or less than a “garden of Eden” narrative which suggests that industrial style agriculture was a foregone conclusion. That wheat had a “fate” in store for humans is only one of many narratives which don’t hold up to intellectual scrutiny. “Harari’s retelling of this myth is compelling because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, likely from infancy.” What the Davids are interested in is a picture of life much more complex than myth.
Though at one point they do hedge their bets and proclaim that myth “is the way human societies give structure and meaning to experience.” But this is only a minor concession, since more often than not they go out of their way to explore how myths of the first human societies have always existed as a type of simplification.
Granted, that these simplifications do much more heavy lifting than one generally recognizes — especially for the oral tradition. Because the thing I have found myself being troubled by is; how to talk about The Dawn of Everything. The ideas it contains are difficult to express in casual conversation. Yet they have an intuitive component; which is to say that the reasoning and examples they site are not spectacularly new. Claude Levi-Strauss, one of the references for their work, was at large in academia in the 1960/70’s. Much of the overlooked anthropological data and speculation that they turn back to has been around for half a century or far more.
What the book really hinges on (apologies to David Wengrow) is the subtle anarcho-philosophy that Graeber explored in his career. There are hints of it everywhere. From reflections on caring labor (reminiscent of this piece originally published in The Guardian), to arguments about the historical reality wherein consensus decision making actually works. Signals of anti-authoritarianism in the wheat argument itself — which the Davids argue more likely came from Egyptian burial culture which needed to provide its dead with leavened bread and beer for the afterlife. Reflections on how most things begin in play. Play farming, the first play kings.
“The real puzzle is not when kings or queens appeared, but when it became impossible to simply laugh them out of court.”
The first chapters of the book feature a Native American, indigenous, critique of western and French life/religious practice. Primarily from the person of a Wyandat statesman named Kondiaronk. The principle feature of the indigenous (of that period and group) lifestyle being that nobody could tell anyone else what to do. Or if they agree to do so they participate on their own terms. (There’s also a curious detour into the cultural practice of fulfilling tribesman’s dreams, which, as explained, is perhaps the only thing one cannot refuse to do. Since not fulfilling a dream wish might create serious illness or death.)
But a quick detour ourselves into Graeber’s career for the uninitiated. His death in 2020 was one of the few ‘celebrity’ deaths I’ve found worth mourning. I had hoped there was at least one more great book in him — and perhaps The Dawn of Everything is that legacy. I first heard about Graeber from his activism in the Occupy Wall Street actions of 2011. He was a principle organizer and speaker. Later I would view, in my opinion, the best lecture ever recorded and uploaded to the internet.
David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time — YouTube
I enjoyed this immensely not because his points were indisputable, but because they were disputable. He embodied what I would term: intellectual bravery. The place where nothing is definitive. The grand political project of his life was to debunk the common sense notion that some type of coercive power is necessary for a large functioning society.
The rest of this piece could quite easily become an adoring eulogy. Still, to try and keep this thing on theme, I want to explore certain other implications of these David’s work. The Dawn of Everything does an excellent job taking to task the common sensical myths of “the stupid savage” and notions that before the advent of industrial style agriculture nothing very interesting was happening in human life and thought. Explaining how humans, unlike any other creatures are distinctly political animals. “You would never see a gorilla mock another gorilla for beating his chest, while human’s (mock) this regularly.” People have, from what the David’s debunk as flawed terminology — the realms of pre-history — been in constant argument and discussion about the best ways to live.
However I think the David’s are fairly upfront in an argument that politics itself may be the most mythical of all human endeavors. “The state is the mask which prevents us from seeing political practice as it actually is.” The simplifications needed to get someone on your side about any given position — to get a large enough party to care about one individual issue — operate very much like myth. It has always seemed strange to me the notion that one would look to politicians for answers. At best they make choices out of a decision tree where one can’t know an outcome and thusly, these politicians, become the bearers of responsibility for the inherent limitations of not knowing the outcome in advance. At worst, well … I doubt I need to explain what the worst version of a politician is. In any case, these decisions need a solid mythical substructure to protect or bolster any given candidates’ ability to make these decisions.
Of course the above is also something of a simplification. The Dawn of Everything does a far better job at providing evidence that common sense ideas like “planting a single seed proved a point of no return” look silly in terms of explaining the development of agriculture. “Cultivation was just one of many ways that Neolithic people managed their environments.”
As a play farmer myself, only fooling around with a plot of dirt about 50 ft. sq., I’ve been surprised how little this is practiced anymore. For treating a garden rather nonchalantly may not give out huge yields — there is a big difference between a plant which produces a lot versus one that produces a little — it also doesn’t take very much labor if one is willing to overlook a few weeds and more or less just have fun with it. When the Davids talk about flood retreat farming, which began at least 3,000 years ago, where a casual farmer would simply cast seed over alluvial soil left behind by the receding banks of a river — it may not seem like common sense these days with private property laws. But also, maybe, because it seems too simple, almost fun. Like a wish cast over a piece of earth. I still find something almost magical about watching a seed germinate from right where I left it.
That there’s “nothing anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming … in no way enslaving (oneself) to their crops or herds” is part of a larger argument that the Davids are making about human freedom and proving that, although it might feel like we’re stuck — in many times throughout history things have been quite different. “Neolithic botanists grew side by side, the change was a leisurely and rather playful one … pretending it was all some rehearsal for the industrial development of cereal agriculture is to miss the point.”
But where are we allowed to play anymore? Where does one go for their alternate realities? Obviously there is something inherently lacking in the corporate sales pitch. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel compelled to turn to simulation. Why the argument that we’re living in a simulation can sound so compelling (even though I don’t understand how a supercomputer capable of reproducing billions of consciousnesses, billions of trees, quintillions of blades of grass and insects wouldn’t actually have an infinitely more complex task than simply making another Douglas Adams style biological Earth as answer to the Big question).
I often find myself turning to video games as the great last bastion of play. A mainstay in the rotation has been Sid Meier’s series Civilization. If you are one of the lucky few who find enough flexibility and challenge in your living life and work to not have time to engage in such games, here’s a quick recap of how it plays. One starts with a small settlement. A group of ancient warriors and a builder. As a turn based game you develop and expand to the resources in your vicinity, often adjusting your strategy for victory based on the random luck of your placement on the map. You meet other neighboring civilizations and begin trade or war. Classically there are five ways to win the game. The most unlikely (nearly impossible) is a faith victory where you start a religion and convert all other civilizations to your denomination. A science victory (finishing three projects to set up a colony on Mars) is the fastest way to win the game — and a domination victory may be the easiest since after capturing two other civilizations one’s power becomes inevitable. A culture victory is the wild card of the bunch, wherein great people produce books and art and one’s museums need to bring in a certain threshold of tourists from other civilizations.
Of course the crux of all games is the need to win. And games like Civilization in some ways reinforce the evolutionary narrative wherein modern state formation follows a predestined path. But also, by seeing it all laid out in this simulated form, watching it happen again and again and learning the tricks to achieve victory may have been a type of scaffolding which allowed my own receptiveness to the David’s arguments about the sillyness of this narrative.
“For most of history then, ritual play existed as a type of laboratory, a repertory of techniques which may or may not have any practical applications.” Admittedly it’s hard to see where video gaming would ever have any practical applications, and thusly is bemoaned for its frivolity. But such protestations — from those who believe only in hierarchy and power as the will for being alive — forget about the inherent playful attitude; one might argue default attitude, one brings to situations in which the mythical substructure has failed them. Didn’t correspond to how they felt in that moment and/or the current problem really does suggest a need for playful alternatives.
Not really knowing anything about sex except my own proclivities (and even those, barely), realizing that things like losing one’s virginity may actually bring up more questions than answers. That is; without a myth to guide me to what I should or shouldn’t do — One becomes aware that there is no real power. And, in a way, one begins to want it desperately. “Scholars tend to demand clear and indisputable evidence for the emergence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top down structures of authority. These later are often considered to be the default mode of history. The kind of structures you would expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.”
This type of common sense is questioned by the David’s. If human beings have always played games, which is more than likely, such default starting places, the basic rules for the game, undoubtedly start the whole process but there’s no reason to assume that once begun this default could or would remain interesting. Let alone ubiquitous. In simulation one commands a space where arbitrary power is often part of the point. But this feeling doesn’t invade or take over the psyche. Where again someone stands up from their TV or computer, perhaps to go to a bathroom where they may catch a look of themselves in a mirror, and one’s thoughts remain somewhere in limbo between myth and reality. That this sense of play, betweenness, gets ignored in political debate is in large part due to the desire for mythological power. (From both the politician and the receiver of their message.) But it is a rare psychological occurrence where an individual will actually need this. Simulation makes it fun to pretend to have this power for ourselves — but mostly one goes about the basic business of life not really thinking about the state or the powerful figures who run it.
The grand question in The Dawn of Everything might just be; how much power do the powerful really have? From examining ancient kings and the scope of their authority which was largely limited to the direct vicinity of their bodies — when lost in this antiquity one wonders if this same principal might not still apply. Of course the modern labor force and the ubiquity of corporations make identifying this power rather more difficult. “To understand the realities of power is to acknowledge the gap between what elites claim they can do and what they can actually do.” To my mind this suggests, as much as anything, a need to learn one’s own psychology. If one can get a sense of the non-reality, the mythological components of these related dynamics, one can at least return to a sense of freedom in the mind — freedom which Sartre argued for so many years ago. Seeing power for what it really is, that it can’t reach inside your own noggin.
Still, even Sartre’s argument is far from perfect as he would’ve recognized in Chekhov’s canonical Ward №6, a novella which features a doctor befriending a patient in an asylum, pondering his own sanity, and eventually losing the comforts which had made up his routine. An elegant composition about the dance we do with freedom everyday.
There’s a quote from Graeber that has stuck with me, popping into the conscious on a pretty regular basis, even if, like The Dawn of Everything, I’m often not sure how to analyze it or put it into the right context to say it aloud to even people who know me well. In any case, it goes like this: “The problem with Utopia is not the idea of a Utopia itself, it’s one Utopia, that’s where things go wrong. What we need is millions of little Utopias.” I think this could easily be a mantra for the anarchist. And it is something of a grand failure of capitalism that people get trapped into work regimes, bullshit jobs or otherwise menial labor, which feels like being stuck. Yet I often get another sense that these little utopias are present in many peoples’ hearts. And perhaps it is due to books like this that a sense of freedom is kept alive. As long as a few of us are willing to question and play, some possibility, at least, remains.
I don’t know how to be entirely precise about this space between reality and myth. What keeps popping into my brain is a billboard that I saw when I was in China. The words were in English, I believe that it was advertising for some new luxury apartments though this was not clear.
Mostly I was fascinated with the phrasing. It may not have been a common sense translation but it had an elegant simplicity.
“There’s a high degree of attention, play that is.”
When we first started giving attention to the kings our play became real and it takes an equal if greater attention to draw our priorities back to the needs of reality and the happiness of truth. In any case I cheers to your attention Mr. Graeber.
