The Dawn of Everything
overturns everything you’ve learned about the agricultural revolution, the
evolution of cities, and the rise of Western civilization. Everything. The authors
aspire to be compared to Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond.
If you haven’t read Diamond’s book, drop everything, and read it now. It is extraordinary.
In comparison, The Dawn of Everything is a disappointment.
At 525 pages with an additional 175 pages of
notes, bibliography, and index, this book screams for an editor. The writing is
simultaneously dense and rambling. Nothing was left out or abridged. Much was
repeated. It reads like a dissertation. The ideas are rewarding, but the
reading is a slog.
For example, the authors make a case that the
European Enlightenment (the inspiration for the French and American Revolutions)
can trace its roots to Native American philosophers. “But as we have seen,
indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to skepticism
of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment,
even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the
process. 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.”
Fascinating, thought-provoking, but difficult
to read. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel first.
The “three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics.”
“Over the course of this book we have had occasion
to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human
history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and
the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the
English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ –
since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends.”
Our legal framework is based on Roman slave law. “Our very word
‘family’ shares a root with the Latin famulus, meaning ‘house slave’, via
familia, which originally referred to everyone under the domestic authority of a
single paterfamilias or male head of household. Domus, the Latin word for
‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but
dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as
a citizen’s power over private property. Through that we arrive at (literally,
‘familiar’) notions of what it means to be ‘dominant’, to possess ‘dominion’
and to ‘dominate’.”
With examples from around the world (China,
India, the Americas, Europe, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Africa), the authors
give examples of cases where cities developed without agriculture, writing, metallurgy,
bureaucracy, or centralized decision making. The evolution from hunter-gathers
to farmers to cities to states is shown to be a European imperialist myth.
“Feminist
anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s [suggests] that most members of what are
called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what
she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance,
is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether
women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make
their own decisions without male interference.”
My 2c. Homo sapiens evolved about a quarter-million years ago. The historical/anthropological record extends back about
10,000 years. There is no reason to expect those people to be significantly
(intelligence, curiosity, desires, relationships) different from people living
today. Any theory that suggests that they are naïve, child-like, or primitive
is bound to be wrong.
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