The Dawn of Everything - IV

Chapter 12 starts by reviewing the competing theories for the origin of human society: either a fall-from-grace story or the progressive alternative. The authors argue against a (purportedly dominant) view of history, with an essential split between pre- and post-Enlightenment phases. The former consisted of traditional societies, and any revolutionary movement was either regressive or religiously inspired. Only in the latter would human beings really have agency.

The difference is illustrated by Mircea Eliade's distinction between cyclical and linear time, quoting the Sacred and Profane [I believe they are completely off on this one: for Eliade, the two kinds of time were not in historical succession, but rather represented different structures in the life of religious people]. Eliade's statement that the perception of sacred time as cyclical changed with Judaism is taken as his own political position and, combined with his far-right sympathies, leads to a view of history which is rather sinister (in particular, antisemitic) and completely absurd [I tend to agree, but mainly because G&W's construction is itself absurd].

Social science is presented as technologically dominated and dismissive of any attempt at earning collective freedom. G&W propose a more organic and "playful" pattern of discovery throughout most of history, with a (speculatively) substantial female participation. This evolution was accompanied by social experiments, among them large-scale egalitarian societies based not on some abstract concept of liberty, but on the three concrete individual freedoms discussed in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, in the course of history they were gradually lost to the point of becoming incomprehensible.

This evolution occurred through division of human societies via schismogenesis, through hierarchical stratification, but also through  warfare, which is however not inevitable (either psychologically or historically). Was it connected to the loss of freedom? Indeed, each of the elements of the modern state curtails one of the basic freedoms. Ancient political systems started with only one or two of these elements, but they all shared a connection between patriarchal household and military force.

For G&W, conceiving social alternatives faces a conceptual difficulty due to the discussion always being carried out in the framework of Roman Law. They see it as based on the individual's power over things and persons, in particular over the slaves, which are both household members and (formally) war-conquered property. This essential connection between care and domination (see Chapter 10) separates Western societies from more egalitarian ones, such as the Wendat. The latter also used violence, but not against their own: war captives were either put to death or adopted into the winning tribe. From this, G&W infer [a bit hastily, I think] that Wendat households and tribes were harmonious and free of violence and hierarchical structure, in stark contrast with France under the Ancien Régime.

One of the misconceptions the authors are trying to correct is the hasty inference from the size of a society to its complexity and from the latter to hierarchy. This reasoning is neither theoretically essential nor historically accurate: some early cities went from egalitarian to authoritarian, while others moved in the opposite direction. This diversity of urban structures is due to their emergence not from the coalescence of small isolated groups, but rather from the "compression" of complex large-scale networks.

Returning to the fundamental connection between "systems of violence and systems of care" and to its role in the establishment of power-based societies, the authors find a possible explanation (and many historical examples) in the work of Franz Steiner, with its focus on 'pre-servile institutions': for Steiner, slavery is a perversion of charity and not, as for Lowie and Clastres (see Chapter 3), a consequence of religious authority.

Finally, this book is supposed to fill a gap in the literature concerning early egalitarian structures, which were more common than previously thought and did not necessarily evolve towards hierarchical ones (in fact, the change often went the other way). A more diverse past means more options for the present, and many elements of modern Western society that we take for granted might have come into existence accidentally. Recognizing this truth could lead to profound changes in the social sciences and in society itself.

Conclusion

The Dawn of Everything is clearly not a dispassionate account of how society may have evolved. It is a selective reading of the available material, combined with (sometimes wild) extrapolations in order to support the conclusion that large-scale decentralized societies can exist, and in fact have existed. In itself, this is not a big problem: Graeber and Wengrow speculate a lot, but it is (as far as I can tell) very intelligent speculation. What I found annoying is their tendency of deriding other authors for speculating to different conclusions.

Another issue that bothered me from the outset was the authors' strange insistence that the concept of social equality was lacking in Western thought until the 17th century. To prove it, they simply ignore any antecedent: it's like Ancient Greece, Roman law or the Reformation never existed. The argument is not even crucial for the thesis of the book: the Amerindians could have had a sophisticated understanding of freedom and equality without needing to teach them to the Europeans!

The schismogenesis concept is also too strong for my taste: if a certain organization existed at a certain time in a given group, then we can argue that its opposite also existed at the same time among its neighbors, without restriction, qualification or nuance. This is a bit too convenient when your goal is to challenge established ideas, because in some sense each sociological result becomes proof of its contrary - one village over.

Finally, although I find interesting the connection they make between violence and care, I am amazed they fail to distinguish in the second term the care of the king for widows and orphans from the service of the slave to the master (Chapter 10). While the former does seem significant for the evolution of society, the latter is forced and not a sign of nurture.