“The Dawn of Everything”: David Wengrow & the Late David Graeber On a New History of Humanity

this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report i'm amy goodman with nermeen shaikh we turn now to a groundbreaking new book it's titled the dawn of everything a new history of humanity it's written by the late anthropologist david graber and the archaeologist david wengrow the book examines how indigenous cultures contributed greatly to what we've come to understand as so-called western ideas of democracy and equality but these contributions have been erased from history after years of research the two men completed the book in the summer of 2020 just weeks before david graber died unexpectedly at the age of 59 on vacation in venice italy graber was a highly influential anthropologist a veteran of the international anti-capitalist movement that pushed for a different vision of globalization his book debt the first five thousand years made the case for sweeping debt cancellation he also helped organize the occupy wall street protests september 17 2011 was credited with hoping to coin the phrase we are the 99 percent in both his academic and activist work david graber looked at ways to radically recreate society this is david graber speaking on democracy now just two days after occupy began so i ended up helping to facilitate a meeting which was at least 2 000 people it was mostly young people and most of them were people who'd gone through the educational system who were deeply in debt and who found it completely impossible to get jobs i mean these people have felt really feel very strongly that um they did the right thing they did exactly what they were supposed to do the system has completely failed them and they're not going to be saved by by the people in charge you're just going to if there's going to be any kind of society like we worth living in we're going to have to create it ourselves that was the late david graber in 2011. we're joined now by his dear friend and co-author david wengrow the two co-wrote the dawn of everything a new history of humanity david wengrow is joining us from london where he's a professor of comparative archaeology at university college london david thanks so much for joining us our condolences on the death of david just as you finished this book you know david lived just down the street from democracy now studios and the ilg houses the international lady garment workers housing complex that's just about a block from here which so much shaped him can you talk about well just start with the title the dawn of everything and this new narrative that you both want to bring to the world well we really started exchanging ideas around the time that you were describing the time of the the occupy movement so around 2011 we exchanged books david gave me uh the debt book that you mentioned there amy i gave him a book i'd written on ancient civilizations and we started swapping ideas we were interested in how our field so i'm an archaeologist as you mentioned david was an anthropologist how we could contribute to debates on social inequality which had really been escalating since the financial crash of 2008 and initially we planned to write something quite short really a sort of pamphlet just to introduce readers to major discoveries from our fields that we felt hadn't really escaped out of the academy into wider consciousness firstly this very conventional idea that before human beings invented agriculture we lived almost exclusively in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers it's not true it's actually wildly inaccurate there simply was no such a period of prolonged political innocence and secondly the equally conventional and entrenched idea that our species became trapped in inequality through the invention of agriculture and then later cities that's not true either actually what the broad sweep of history shows is that living in large scale densely populated technologically sophisticated societies really doesn't require people to simply give up social freedoms in the way that we're often told it does as you can probably gather by now this was already getting beyond a short pamphlet uh and david uh one of the the the critical points that your uh book uh makes uh is that the encounter between indigenous intellectuals and early european colonists was very important to what we now refer to as the enlightenment uh ideas of of democracy and of inequality and one of the central figures you name is uh condiaronk a 17th late 17th century indigenous intellectual so could you explain who he was and what his example illustrates about this broader history of the encounter between european colonists and indigenous peoples yes well it goes back to the first question really we realized there was something fundamentally strange about the fact that human history is conventionally framed in this way about a question about the origins of inequality where does the question come from i mean it already assumes that there's something else an age of equals or an age of freedom and tracing it back to its origins they really go back to an essay competition in 1753 a french academy poses that question what is the origin of social inequality and reflecting on this we realized this is strange we're talking about france before the revolution one of the most hierarchical societies on earth why do people already assume that things were once different and following that line of inquiry led us as you say to the americas and this encounter between european colonists and indigenous societies particularly around the region of the great lakes of what's now canada and kandia wrong i mean it was in that area that europeans first encountered entire societies built on principles of social freedom that were still completely alien to european civilizations at the time and kandironk was very much a product of that social media he was a leading figure in wendar's society at the time he was one of the signatories in 1701 of the great peace of montreal apart from being a warrior and a diplomat he was clearly regarded by almost everyone who met him europeans and indigenous people was simply one of the most intelligent people they'd ever met a great thinker a great orator and he was routinely invited to the the fort the the table of the then french governor of that part of the colonies to engage in debates with europeans on topics that ranged from christianity to marriage customs the role of money and the whole idea of political freedoms and many of these conversations were recorded and in them kandirank launches a truly stinging critique of european behavior there's a lot about women's freedoms there's a lot about the obsession with wealth and money as forms of power there are many observations on poverty and the kind of endemic homelessness that was apparent already then in european towns colonial towns included and there's a lot of discussion a lot of criticism of the way that europeans are constantly on the one hand competing with each other but also deferring to each other on the basis of rank and status which seems to have been a principle that was alien and absent from iroquois speaking societies at the time so if a wendart chief wanted to engage people in some kind of collective project there was no real way to command or coerce so it was all really predicated on persuasion and it was widely observed by jesuit missionaries and others at the time that people would sit in the village plaza for long hours each day debating and trying to convince each other and reach consensus on the issues of the time and it's actually not contested that europe in the the age of enlightenment adopted important cultural habits from the americas smoking tobacco from pipes drinking caffeinated beverages but for some reason it never seems to occur to historians to ask if we also borrowed concepts and ideas and in the book we tried to show that that's exactly what happened and kandiranka is a is really a product of that culture which influenced europe in quite profound ways and also i mean one of the things that's that's very striking about the book is precisely what you say here that uh you know there there was uh from kandiaronk and presumably others to these uh critiques of european society at the time could you explain why you think these critiques have been all but entirely erased from the records from historical records it's a very interesting question because um from time to time over the last um few decades uh historians uh some of them like the historian george sui who is in fact himself of the huron when dead nation with a phd in history have drawn attention to these sources but for reasons that i can't really explain that really reflect i think very poorly on our institutions and on the academy they have been marginalized and one thing we tried to do in our book is really shine a light on that existing scholarship i'd like to go back to 2018 when david graber talked about the dawn of everything it was during a teach-out outside your school the university college london we started saying well well maybe the inequality question if we just move that aside what is the real question isn't where did the inequality come from where did hierarchy come from it's like how did we get stuck in one mode right because it's very different having a police force you're going to be in the police force this year but next year you will and next year after that you will and you know so so so they're not people aren't going to behave the same in a hierarchy if the hierarchy is going to get ripped down for half the year and everybody has to deal with each other right as equals so that's the late david graber david wengrow you're sitting right next to him outside your school and so if you can explain the current uh debates about both democracy and equality and how they are really explained differently in the dawn of everything in this new history of humanity well it's interesting and a bit painful to listen to that clip for many reasons one of which is that we're going to be on strike again in a few weeks time over exactly the same issue um what david's describing there is one of the major things that came out of our research which is that human beings for most of the history of our species has simply been a much more playful and experimental species than we tend to give ourselves credit for including a propensity to simply invent and experiment with different forms of political arrangements once you realize this is the case the question itself changes we start thinking differently about the big questions of human history if it's not about the origins of inequality so if we do away with this false notion that there was once this society of equals what is it then about and what david's talking about in that clip is really the other question that then comes into view which is how did we get stuck in a situation where these days we find it almost impossible to even imagine let alone put into effect other forms of social arrangements and how stuck are we really in that respect and i think the the first step towards answering that question is precisely to examine the big story that we tell about the history of our species and about human capacities in general so what we're trying to do in the book is really blow away the cobwebs of all these outdated theories and basically myths which persuade us that the kinds of inequality we have today are in fact an inevitable result of social evolution and once you take those things away what you're left with is really people making everyday decisions and that in itself seems to us an important step in getting unstuck and talk about um the argument you make around war and competition that it is not evolutionarily in human beings it's not inevitable talk about this different view of history when it comes to war well when you see when you look directly at the evidence and we do have pretty good evidence direct evidence these days for things like rates of violence and interpersonal conflict and injuries in the archaeological record what you see i mean the way i would put it is that yes warfare and violence can be traced very very far back in the history of our species but they're no more inevitable in that body of evidence than periods of peace periods of violence and war come and they go so one can't say that we're innately war-like and competitive any more or less than you can say we are innately altruistic and cooperative the question um which really emerges from the book is why it is that at certain points in history violence including warfare has a more profound and durable effect than at others in other words why passing acts of violence which are obviously always traumatic but they don't always become structural they don't always become embedded in the fabric of homes and family life some of the other things you've touched on already in your show today um and that became a real focus of the book and the focus of trying to understand how it is that our societies have got to the stage where we do feel trapped and stuck and simply by diagnosing the problem better we feel that that in itself is important in reflecting on how one can then untangle oneself from those kinds of violence could you explain david also the you know from david graber's clip that we just played uh how this conception of war and violence also has something to do with the fact of hierarchies being fluid in the way that your book shows and that david spoke about that people who were occupied powerful positions did not occupy them in perpetuity meaning not even in the same year that that there was a constant shift between those who were in power and those who were not this is an excellent example of what um i was talking about in the sense of the experimental nature of human politics when we think about hunter-gatherer societies we tend to think of perhaps one or two basic forms of egalitarian society actually what we found is that there's really a large literature on societies that some of them practiced agriculture some didn't that actually used to flip or alternate their social systems on a seasonal basis one of the examples in the book which david was referring to there were the plains nations of north america which at a certain time of year it was the time of year when the the bison the buffalo came through in on their seasonal migrations would form into a kind of society that in some respects resembles what we today would call a state there was a police force there were squads of soldiers who had full coercive powers if anyone endangered the success of the hunt they could be whipped they could be imprisoned they could even be killed but the point about this well there's two points first of all is that the individuals who occupied those roles those coercive roles rotate it on an annual or biennial basis so you could actually be confronting the person who you've whipped in prison punished the next year but from the other end of the the process and the second is that these societies with their coercive institutions uh didn't last beyond the period of the hunting season and the sundance rituals which followed and actually for the rest of the year these plain societies would split off into demographically smaller groups which had entirely different moral systems and actually where coercion wasn't permitted and people would have to resolve disputes through processes of deliberation and debate david you write also in the book just to look at the context of the arguments that you make in this you know quite monumental work 700 pages long that the book began as an appeal to ask better questions so you know as academics journalists activists committed to social justice and greater levels of equality what are the questions that we should be asking well as you mentioned david was deeply involved in the global justice movement and at least as i perceive it the central question of that movement is whether our current cultural system with all of its issues including issues of sustainability and the climate crisis whether this is really basically the only way that we can organize our societies today or whether there are in fact viable alternatives and as an anthropologist and and an archaeologist it's a very logical thing to do is then to look simply look at all the other ways that humans have in fact organized themselves over the whole span of our species history and when you do that in the light of modern scientific evidence other questions and other possibilities do in fact come to light for example questions about sustainable cities actually it turns out that for many centuries or even thousands of years we have evidence now of really large-scale densely populated societies which lived in cities that were essentially decentralized in terms of their decision-making processes we have examples of mass societies which organize themselves without reducing people to uh numbers in a queue so they don't have the kind of impersonal bureaucracies that we we just sort of take for granted today and feel feel kind of inevitable and we also have some very striking examples including uh one from uh pre-columbian central america from mexico david we are systems of democracy which were based on the principle of containing one's ego rather than flaunting one's ego we're gonna have to leave it there david i thank you so much for being with us but people can get it in the book by david wenger and the late david graber the dawn of everything a new history of humanity i'm amy goodman with nermeen shaikh you

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Keywords: Amy Goodman, Breaking News, Democracy Now, Independent Media, News, Politics, World News, democracynow

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Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021