An Anti-Civilisation Critique of The Dawn of Everything

Certainly, our distant ancestors were far more rational than we give them credit for, but it was their irrational quality that distinguished them from the automatons which followed.

Written by Darren Allen.

David Graeber was, like Noam Chomsky, a rationalist, democratic, technophilic socialist who appropriated the radicalism of anarchism in order to distance himself from the conspicious futility of the professional leftism he embodied. He uncritically supported democracy (and was unable or unwilling to accept that it tyrannously subordinates individuals), he was uncritical of standard leftist causes (such as anti-racism, and other tools of management), he had no real interest in genuine anarchist revolt (continually focusing his ‘activism’ through statist party politics), he was uncritical of professionalism (firing potshots at every job conceivable in his book Bullshit Jobs, yet curiously reluctant to attack doctors, teachers, lawyers and so on1), he was uncritical of technology (lamenting that we’re not technologically advanced enough2) and when push came to shove and state-imposed lockdowns inaugurated a new dawn of subjugation and control, he was strangely silent (offering not a word of criticism before his death in September 20203).

Perhaps more surprising, for a celebrated ‘anarchist’ professor of anthropology, David Graeber wasn’t, despite appearances to the contrary, very interested in the origins of human society, because he believed there were no such origins. We were, as he argued in his last book, co-authored with David Wengrow (G&W), always kind of civilised, always kind of screwed up, so no need to investigate how the horrific civilisation we have began. Graeber didn’t want to criticise the nightmares of early civilised life and the psychological descent that mass domestication represented. He liked civilisation. He believed that cities, states, technology and private property were inevitable. Like other goodies of mainstream socialist-anarchism, he liked fighting ‘fascists’, ‘sexists’ and other right-wing baddies on the other side of the stage; remaining within the theatre that granted him his fame and influence.4

The Dawn of Everything (DOE) promises to deliver an explanation of how humanity got in the terrible state it is in today; how the world of misery, futility, coercion and control that covers the earth started, or ‘dawned’. This is framed as ‘how did we get stuck in one mode of social organisation?’ G&W find some evidence—not very much, but some—to suggest that in the period just before the horrors of civilisation, around ten thousand years ago, we ‘played’ at seasonal hierarchies, bowing down to a king in winter before gadding off into anarchic tribes during the holidays. Then, G&W say, we got disastrously ‘stuck’ in the repressive, monarchical mode.

But how? The reader has to wait to the very end of DOE to find the answer to the oft-teased question, ‘what went wrong?’ There, in the last itty-bitty section of the last chapter, we discover that this horrendous world came about because ‘people began defining themselves against each other’, because we became confused about the difference between ‘care and domination’ and between ‘external violence’ (warfare) and ‘internal care’ (our relation to our family and our possessions). That’s it.

G&W can’t and won’t answer the most important question they ask, so what questions can they answer? They have two other ambitions; one is trivial and reasonably convincing, the other critically important and completely unconvincing. The first aim, which we could call the ‘fluid history’ theory, is to show that certain beliefs held about the distant past are actually false, or at best misleading. These beliefs include the idea that there were rigidly deterministic causes for repressive societies, that there were sharply demarcated stages in sociopolitical development (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, civilisations) and that it is impossible for groupings of a certain size to be anything other than repressive.

G&W show that these beliefs can sometimes be rather crude. An agricultural society does not have to be one of civilised brutality. In most cases (at least in Eurasia, where states first arose) the earliest agricultural (and ‘proto-agricultural’) societies did eventually lead to the repressive societies we associate with ‘squeezing as many calories as possible from a handful of seed grasses’, they did lead to ill health, social stratification, hyper-specialisation and the utter misery of agricultural societies everywhere; but some of them also appear to have been reasonably pleasant places to live. And that’s nice to know. Perhaps we modern folk can, like our distant cousins, also have casual groupings of ‘federated’ tribes or communities non-hierarchically cooperating with each other? Perhaps a society founded on casual horticulture is possible for us?

DOE also does a good job in showing that large and reasonably complex societies of such ‘federated’ groupings, such as existed in North America when Europe first started colonising it, do not have to be repressive. Again, in an important sense these more complex hunter-gatherer societies did eventually terminate in states, but it is, as G&W point out, also important to recognise that they don’t have to, that we can live in a world in which local groups overlap into a greater whole, without any central power dominating the whole thing.

G&W also show, following James C. Scott,5 that there was not a brutally rigid progression in history from simple hunter-gatherer societies 6, to complex societies, to horticulture, to agriculture, to states and then to civilised empires. In reality the transition from prehistory to history was very long and very messy, with some proto-agricultural societies appearing earlier than we used to think and some forms of social simplicity existing well into the civilised era. This is surely as anyone with any intelligence would expect, but it’s always nice to see crude systems ‘fractalised’ somewhat. It doesn’t alter the fact that there were what can be called stages in the collective human story though, just as there are in our individual lives (childhood, adolescence, youth, etc.).

It is true that rudimentary cities sometimes appeared before intensive agriculture and that agriculture didn’t always lead to horrendous oppression or to urbanisation… but so what? There were simple bands in the far distant past, there were simple forms of agriculture which followed these simpler groupings, then there were more complex forms, then there were civilised states. Those are the facts. Understanding the differences between these stages is useful and important, and we need to draw conceptual demarcations in order to do this; unless you are committed to a kind of postmodern, distinction-obliterating, ‘fluid’ view of our past, as G&W appear to be, here and with the second point they want to make, which is not at all trivial. This we could call the ‘perpetual present’ theory, which is that, essentially, there was ‘no such thing as a garden of Eden’, that we were not once in a kind of innocent paradise or, conversely, that what we call prehistory—our pre-civilised ancient past—wasn’t really any different to the agricultural and urban societies which followed. There was, say G&W, a massive amount of variation in how people lived, but we’ve always kind of lived in cities and had states, we’ve always kind of had inequality, we’ve always kind of had hierarchies, we’ve always kind of had agriculture and we’ve always kind of had bureaucracy. We have always been, in sum, kind of civilised.

How do G&W try to persuade us of these things, and, by implication, that domestication, stratification, urbanisation, agriculture, specialisation and technology are natural, right, good for us? Firstly, they redefine ‘city’, ‘state’, ‘equality’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘agriculture’, ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘civilisation’ so that pre-civilised societies can be described as civilised, hierarchical, bureaucratic, etc. The idea of ‘bureaucracy’ is expanded to casual systems of abstract management, the idea of ‘city’ is expanded to ‘large gathering places’, the idea of ‘agriculture’ is expanded to gardening, the idea of ‘hierarchy’ is expanded to include seasonal, playful or sacred leadership and the idea of ‘property’ is expanded to mean possession (even, amazingly, possession in a sacred sense; apparently the idea that a lake ‘belonged’ to a Great Spirit shows that we always had private property!). With their own blasted definitions in place G&W can then declare that we’ve kind of always had ‘property’, ‘bureaucracy’, ‘cities’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘hierarchies’. This is like saying that we’ve always had cars because when you think about it boats are cars, or hunter gatherers had access to the internet because mushrooms exchange information too.

Secondly, to blend the prehistorical with the historical, the authors focus on certain kinds of early Neolithic societies—those of the past 10,000 years (particularly those between the fifth to the tenth millennium bc in Eurasia and those of the most recent pre-conquest millennia in Amerindia). The 250,000 years of history before that don’t interest them quite as much, because there is no evidence for the cities, states and kings they want to show have ‘always’ been with us. The societies that G&W are most interested in are those which are relatively recent and between simple hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural states, although they are forced to ignore the ‘relatively’ and argue that the ‘between’ is really an illusion. They wish to obscure the fact that there was a relatively recent stage between the simple bands we lived in for hundreds of thousands of years and states. They can then argue, or assume, that we’ve probably always lived like these more complex, recent societies, which were really ‘kind of like civilised states’.

The third way G&W can do away with the ‘myth’ of the good life we once lived and smear history together into a single semi-civilised mush, is to focus on social forms (which are amenable to the conceptual analysis of academics like G&W) and on what they call ‘self-conscious’ decision making (meaning rational planning). Innocence, soft consciousness, joy, simplicity of life, non-alienating experience and other qualities widely attested in simple hunter-gatherers are absent from their analysis, at least in any meaningful sense.

These are the three means by which G&W defend civilisation. Let’s take a more detailed look, returning first to their semantic shenanigans. In order to argue that we’ve always kind of lived in civilised societies G&W assure us that areas where large numbers of semi-civilised peoples met were ‘really’ cities. They provide a handful of examples, such as ‘Poverty Point’ in North America, or Aguada Fénix in pre-Mayan Central America as evidence; without dwelling on the fact that, firstly, these were recent Neolithic societies and, secondly, that they were almost certainly meeting places. Poverty Point’s status as a dwelling or meeting place has long been debated and will probably never be resolved, although it was certainly not a ‘hunter-gatherer metropolis’—they practiced horticulture and there is no decisive evidence of dwellings. The authors of the paper that G&W rely on in the latter case tell us that ‘the scarcity of residential platforms… suggests a substantial portion of the inhabitants… maintained a degree of residential mobility.’ 7

So this was not a city either, not in anything but G&W’s loose sense, and even if it were, it would be one of a handful of recent examples, such as the Calusa people of southwest Florida, a complex, stratified ‘hunter-gatherer kingdom’ also cited by G&W—which subsisted on papaya and maize. So not hunter-gather either, and certainly not simple.

Another example of G&W blasting the walls away from a word is ‘egalitarianism’, which they want us to believe has never really been with us. In order to defend this extraordinary claim they tell us, first of all, that it makes no sense to discuss equality when the people in question didn’t. This is like saying we can’t talk about the psychology of children because children don’t read Freud, or the beauty of butterflies because butterflies don’t have a word for beauty. Children ‘understand’ psychology and butterflies ‘understand’ beauty, just as primal folk understood equality—they just called it ‘freedom’. In order to deflect the reader’s attention away from this foundational meaning, they throw sand in his eyes: ‘Everyone,’ they say, ‘agrees that equality is a value; no one seems to agree on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?’

G&W tell us that societies like the seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq, Algonkians or Wendat are referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’ without anyone ever really clarifying what the word ‘equality’ really means. Are authors who reference these societies talking about an ideology, the belief that everyone in society should be the same, or one in which people actually are the same? And what does this mean?

This is criminal obfuscation. It’s like saying that ‘rape’ doesn’t really exist because nobody can agree what ‘consent’ really means, or that there is no such thing as a good omelette because everyone has their own ideas of what constitutes a well-cooked egg. The egalitarianism that really matters, here and elsewhere, is freedom to do as one pleases without being told what to do, as Greaber and Wengrow themselves point out. They tell us that freedom in American societies was founded on the powerlessness of leaders and that aboriginal Americans continually mocked the submissive obedience of Europeans. The authors know that this mockery was not based on ‘an ideology, the belief that everyone in society should be the same’, but they glide past this so they can claim that egalitarianism never really existed, that ‘they are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious tokens of inequality are missing’ when they are actually egalitarian in the most obvious and basic sense, of nobody having power over anyone else (except the soft power of age, experience and persuasive intelligence).

This, once again, the authors recognise elsewhere. They tell us that ‘there was usually a degree of equality by default; an assumption that humans are all equally powerless in the face of the gods; or a strong feeling that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to another’s’. But for some reason this isn’t real equality, or it is just one equality among others which are all somehow equally valid or equally applicable.

G&W know—and tell us—that people can be honoured for all kinds of reasons, given lavish burials and even be put into positions of responsibility without having the power to coerce or to enforce any rules. They know this, they tell us this, yet they present the discovery of well-provisioned graves before the year 10,000 as evidence that we have always been somehow unequal, or that the well-known and widely attested egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers is something of an illusion.

It’s strange though, say G&W, that the number of such graves is vanishingly few. ‘We still have to ask’, they write, scratching their heads, ‘why the evidence is so patchy in the first place’. It can’t be for the transparently obvious reason, that everyone recognises, that inequality, in the most important sense we use this word, was, for hundreds of thousands of years, non-existent, can it?

G&W argue that because building monuments indicates complex stratification, the existence of commemorative structures in the distant past shows that we’ve always lived in complex stratified societies. The monuments they are referring to are the so-called ‘mammoth-huts’ of late palaeolithic Northern Europe, which probably took a couple of people a couple of days to make. Apparently these are not really any different to the large monuments of Göbekli Tepe or the vast pyramids of ancient Egypt, despite the fact that they are orders of magnitude simpler. As Peter Turchin points out, ‘momumentality’ expands roughly and simply in line with tech and population. Equating mammoth huts with Göbekli Tepe and the pyramids is like saying… well, it’s like saying all the other things G&W say in order to argue that simple hunter-gatherer bands 24,000 years ago, large interconnected Amerindian neolithic societies and centralised civilisations 8 were all kind of the same really. It is to G&Ws credit that they dispel the myth that simpler people were simpler minded and unable to perform remarkable technical feats or to display intelligence which would put our university professors to shame. The issue is the ridiculous and unfounded leap the authors make into equating the capacity for rational thought with the dominating structures of civilisation—based on, here, a heap of bones.

This brings us onto technology, something else which G&W are keen to justify, at least by omission. They tell us, again correctly, that the presence of some tech does not automatically and deterministically lead to its repressive use, but they ignore the role of technology in subordinating men and women. This is because David Graeber doesn’t have a critical word to say about technology, he had no interest in engaging with our greatest critics of technology and he yearned for force fields, teleportation, antigrav fields, jet packs and immortality drugs. The idea that technology beyond a limit automatically subjugates men and women to its needs, infects their consciousness with its utilitarian priorities, degrades man’s apprehension of the ineffable, trivialises nature, numbs awareness, forces dependency, supplants free choice 9 and tends towards the colonisation of every sphere of human activity; none of this was of interest to Graeber (as it is not to most socialists). It’s no surprise technology plays at best a walk-on part in DOE or its evils are dismissed, again, with a wave of the indeterministic hand.

Let’s take another look at determinism, or at what causes or leads to repressive societies. Towards the end of the book G&W present to us three kinds of control, three ways in which freedom can be limited, which they exemplify with a neat little story about Kim Kardashian’s diamonds. To stop people from stealing her jewels, they say, she needs certain powers—I call these dominants—to stop would-be thieves. These are control of violence (she can call on the state and its police if someone tries to steal them), control of information (she can hide them, or employ people to hide them) or individual charisma (she can persuade everyone she is special enough to deserve the diamonds).

It’s an interesting and admirably clear illustrative example, but there are other ways Kim can protect her diamonds. Firstly she could, if she were some kind of high priestess or super-influential professional, convince people that diamonds are worthless. This is similar to ‘controlling information’ but she does nothing to alter the flow of communication or conceal the facts that comprise it. Instead she redefines the relationship of individuals to diamonds (creating or contributing to what Ivan Illich called newspeak).

Secondly, she could also create a society which so stupefies and confuses people, they become too weak to take them from her, or too stupid to recognise their value, or simply unable, from the way society is structured, to get close to her. Of course she couldn’t do this on her own. She would require almost unimaginable power—almost unimaginable, because such power is available; through technology. Indeed the value of the diamonds is partly dependent on technology—the technology of money—in the first place.

Thirdly, as society ‘progresses’ under the influence of dominants, the source of domination, the selfish self, acquires more and more power. When we say that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ what we mean is that it fuels selfishness, turning people with power into grotesque, cancerous caricatures of themselves. The powerful self, through democratic groupthink, fashions society in its image, until the world outside and the world within become one, at which point it simply becomes normal that hollow, artificial ‘media-personalities’ like Kim Kardashian possess the ludicrous power they do. This may appear to be a very modern problem, but in fact primal societies put self-overcoming—conceived as acting in accordance with the will of the cosmos or of the gods—at the heart of their activities.

G&W then only tell us half the story about dominants—because they are complicit in the half they omit—leaving us with a skewed idea of what actually constitutes repression and coercion in our world. The power of the professional class, the power of technology and the power of the ego, along with the three dominants that G&W mention, have now subordinated individuals, and their communities, completely to the system, so much so that we are at the point where it is practically meaningless even to speak of power. Where is it? Who wields it? It is there, but we hardly need the threat of overt violence, the manipulation of information and the hypnotic influence of charismatic leaders to control people, because the system itself is in charge. Even professionals and their institutions are becoming obsolete. Human beings are automatically disciplined by their estrangement from reality.

Again there is not, as G&W continually point out, a rigidly deterministic path that has led us here, a strict causal-literal relationship between dominants and the societies they frame or control, which can take all manner of forms and take some surprising routes to them. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the less freedom we have, the more power dominants have over our lives, the more ‘stuck’ we become, until we can’t even imagine freedom, let alone desire it. This is how civilisations became the nightmarish death-factories we recognise in history—indeed which comprise history—which began with the Bronze Age horror show that erupted in Mesopotamia, and which appeared again and again in more and more advanced and repressive forms. As technologies progressed and developed (starting with organised agriculture, iron smelting, money, literacy and so on), as neighbouring or successive states were forced to adopt technologies to defend themselves against more powerful neighbours, as—again, thanks to technology—populations increased, as bureaucracy proliferated and as states, professionals and egos became more and more powerful, so civilisation got worse and worse and worse.

G&W are mystified by how this all happened. They can’t explain how we ‘got stuck’ because they have a partial and ambiguous view of dominants, because they don’t really understand human nature, because they refuse to accept how, beyond a critical mass, the power and presence of dominants subordinates society (a recognition of limit informs all intelligent attitudes to society and nature, including those of the indigenous cultures G&W respect) and because they are not interested in how, as the system becomes more powerful, it creates more and more misery. This is what gives DOE, like all of Graeber’s books10, its curiously ‘weightless’ feel. Nothing in it is rooted in the real world.

Technology isn’t the biggest or most serious of G&W’s blindspots. Their gravest omission—and, actually, the source of David Graeber’s enthusiasm for technologically advanced socialist democracies—is also the subtlest and most disastrous. G&W tell us, again and again, that they want to show how early people ‘self-consciously chose’ what kinds of societies they wanted to live in. They ‘self-consciously chose’ monarchism, they ‘self-consciously chose’ to build monuments, they ‘self-consciously chose’ horticulture and they ‘self-consciously chose’ to congregate in cities before self-consciously dispersing into smaller groups. G&W emphasise self-consciousness and choice because these are rational, quantitative attributes—precisely the attributes which lead to dominating, domesticating states. G&W want us to believe that early people were essentially technicians, rationally organising their societies. While telling us that we must ‘demythologise’ the past, G&W overlay it with their own materialist myth. Where, in DOE, is the mythic sense of the transcendent, the ritualised immersion in the non-human and the love of the mysterious wild? These weren’t just secondary frills for primal people, they were the motivating core and ineffable fabric of their entire lives.

Certainly, our distant ancestors were far more rational than we give them credit for, achieving almost miraculous feats of coordinated conceptualisation, but it was their irrational quality that distinguished them from the automatons which followed. G&W, rationalists in the Enlightenment tradition, have no interest in this quality. None. This makes it impossible for them to understand how we fell from our original nature, what has happened to people as the power of their kings, professionals, tools, egos, states and systems has increased, what we can do about our confinement or how it is ever likely to end.

There is also no recognition of the relationship between people and place and how this is disrupted by technology. The wild has no place in DOE, nor do the lessons it can teach us and has taught us. The reader will search in vain for an understanding of the existential insecurity and attachment to idols (gods, politics, technology, money, groupthink, etc.) that separation from the wild engenders in man. Innocence, sensitivity, presence, cheer, genius and love play no role in G&W’s work, and the idea that people once exhibited these irrational qualities to any great extent, or that they are central to our understanding of what is wrong with the world, or how to overcome it; all this is ignored or brushed away as ‘Edenic myth-making’.

G&W want us to believe that, basically, before we ‘got stuck’, through our pesky definitions and confusion, with kings and presidents and popes, we were all once rational technicians, rationally planning what kind of world we want to live in, rationally deciding to ‘play’ for half the year as kings before rationally ‘playing’ at living in smaller mobile bands. G&W want us to believe that, basically, we lived in hierarchical, bureaucratically managed cities with rationally planned trading routes and monuments. G&W want us to believe that the socialist, democratic, feminist, leftist, professionally-managed technocratic world they wish to inhabit is somehow right and natural, even eternal. This is a shameful misrepresentation of humanity, one that has led, and can only lead, to misery.

Darren Allen writes radical philosophy and outsider literature. He is the author of many books. You can find his non-fiction on his Substack, called Expressive Egg.

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1

Bullshit Jobs has almost nothing on the fundamental cause of pointless work. Graeber focuses on fascinating but secondary matters, such as how inequality creates ‘managerial feudalism’ (useless and well-paid placeholder tasks) and how the insane debt-economy creates jobs which serve bureaucracy. He has no interest, however, in analysing the rise of the techno-bureaucratic elite and its alienating effect on public life, which is why what he has to say about bureaucracy, technology and work never really feels rooted, or real — always interesting, but always peripheral.

2

See David Wants to Fly; The ‘Mad Fantasies’ of David Graeber for a good overview.

3

My guess is that he would have waited, like all those brave souls who came out against the tyranny a year and a half after it had begun, until it was safe to do so. That’s really what ‘stay safe’ meant during the ‘pandemic’ — protect your brand, your career and your follower-count.

4

Which he made many coy allusions to; ‘Imagine my surprise when I found out I’d accidentally changed the world’—that kind of thing.

5

See James C. Scott, Against the Grain.

6

‘Simple’ here meaning small in size and modest in impact; the social and cultural life of such bands were actually extremely complex.

7

Inomata, 2020.

8

Such as grim hierarchical, warlike city-states, Tikal or Mohenjo-daro, which G&W are keen to portray, against all the evidence, as places without centralised storage facilities, palaces or evidence of extreme inequality.

9

In the sense that there is no human decision that can be made between which of two technologies or techniques to use, for one is always objectively superior.

10

Which appear to be well written, because each paragraph is very clear, but which actually go round and round and round and round, always seeming to lead to a foundational, world-shaking point, but never actually doing so.

Source: Aporia