The Dawn of Everything: Chapter One
I can't promise I'll do a post for every chapter, that would be a bit nuts, but I'll get the whole thing in here eventually
I have had complicated feelings towards David Graeber since I first encountered his work. That there was brilliance in a lot of what he did was never in doubt to me. He was a consummate big-picture thinker, often distilling core concepts down into language that was both simple and pithy. But like others I also found that Graeber could be sloppy with the micro in his zeal to define the macro. For example, when his essential book Debt: The First 5000 Years was published and conversations about it ensued, Graeber suggested that checking and saving accounts are assets for those banks, when in fact they are liabilities. This is not a minor matter for bank balance sheets, or so I was told at the time, and it seemed to be an embarrassing mishap for someone who had just published a book about debt. (I should also admit here, in the interests of full disclosure, that I had about a half-dozen run-ins with Graeber on social media, none of which were cordial.) But as his viral “Bullshit Jobs” essay showed, Graeber’s ability to find the pulse of certain issues was hard to deny, and he was beloved in many leftist circles. I have no preexisting knowledge of David Wengrow, other than that he is a well-respected archaeologist.
When I say I approach this book with some trepidation, I want to make clear that it has less to do with either David and more to do with the scale of their project. My intertwining unease and excitement about this book stems largely from the fact that I often look askance at “everything you know is wrong” style nonfiction. (The authors announce that they have created “a new science of history” (pg. 24), so I can’t be accused of overstating their perception of the grandeur of their own project.) First, no it probably isn’t - somethings, I’ll grant you, but not everything! - and second because the history of ideas shows us how easy it is to replace one wrong understanding with a different wrong understanding. What’s more, while I sometimes love books of this scope, with ambitions as tall as this, they often fall into that same habit of getting the details wrong in their quest to understand the big picture.
In the early going, we get a bit of both, a bit of the epic sweep of history well told and a bit of detail that makes me queasy. When the Davids write that asking “whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin” (pg. 2), I am struck by the cleverness and aphoristic simplicity of the sentence. When they share a Margaret Mead anecdote that has had its authenticity seriously challenged by many, with no sense that they know this controversy exists (endnote 17, pg. 529), I get worried. The fact that they do so immediately after slamming Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond for factual mistakes makes it a little harder to swallow.