A radical retelling of civilization’s origins leads to an expansive vision of human possibility. | Perspective by Horganism
These are dark times, and I take solace where I can get it. Lately I’ve gotten it from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by anthropologist David Graeber, who died shortly after finishing the book, and archaeologist David Wengrow. Dawn is both a dense, 692-page scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization and an exhilarating vision of human possibility.
Hobbes, for obvious reasons, is popular with those who like the status quo. The Davids demolish the Hobbesian narrative by pointing to complex, agricultural societies—in Asia, the Middle East and the Americas—that governed themselves in nonhierarchical ways. The Davids also show the inadequacy of paradigms inspired by Marx and Darwin. Marxists see history as the struggle for material resources, such as food, land and water. Darwinians trace everything to the propagation of genes. These models, like those of Hobbes and Rousseau, fail to do justice to the immense diversity of human behaviors, both today and in the past.
Pinker defends modern civilization with charts tracking increases in wealth, health, freedom and peace. I appreciate this aspect of Pinker’s work, which I see as a healthy antidote to despair and fatalism. That’s why I invited him to speak at my school last year. Reading Dawn, I found myself talking back to the Davids. They ask how we got “stuck” with our hierarchical, and largely patriarchal, social structures, but they do not provide a clear-cut answer. I’d like to offer one, which I propose in The End of War.
These strange customs, perhaps, can be explained by terror-management theory, which holds that dread of death underpins many of our behaviors. We build monuments and deify leaders in an effort to transcend our mortality. Modern humans are not exactly immune to these irrational impulses.
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