Re-indigenization

Considering The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything is a sprawling, ambitious book in the tradition of massively popular, meta-historical overviews such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Book such as these are, inevitably, polemics. Whether consciously or not, they make a case for a particular attitude toward human history with implications for our future prospects. What follows are initial thoughts inspired by the book, which I intend to continue in future newsletters.

The Dawn of Everything has an explicit political agenda: Graeber (author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years who sadly passed away last year) was an anarchist. As a social philosopher, his ideas inspired the 2011 Occupy movement. He openly admitted that he intended to rewrite the past to correspond with his particular social vision.

The battle over the past — waged in books and other forms of media — is always a fight for the future. Harari’s Sapiens, for example, provides ideological cover for mainstream Neoliberalism. I found it unsurprising that Obama, Zuckerberg, and Clinton touted it. Harari’s vision of the future, presented in his book Homo Deus, is utterly depressing but not unrealistic: A post-work world where the vast majority play immersive video games all day, while a tiny elite of technocrats and engineers design and define their options. “Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the ‘real world’ outside,” he writes.

I found parts of The Dawn of Everything exhilarating and brilliant, particularly the early chapters. But as the book progresses (it logs in at something like 700 pages), the arguments become increasingly convoluted. The going gets sloggy.

Setting up their thesis early on, they write: “There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian — or, conversely, that large ones must necessary have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like this are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.” They tell us: “The course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.”

The underlying message is, of course, if humanity’s ancient past turns out to include a wide variety of social experiments — some violent, some peaceful; some requiring kings, some democratic; some based on possession of esoteric ritual knowledge, some relatively agnostic and cosmopolitan — our future is also undetermined and open to intentional choice. Granted more agency, we have reason to believe we can be creative in how we reorganize our society. History is not necessarily a straight shot from tribes to monarchies to Empires to global Capitalism to totalitarian technocratic control / Singularity.

I consider myself an anarchist — the principle of “mutual aid” is how I envision an ideal society — and Graeber and Wengrow’s underlying purpose resonates with me. Unfortunately, I found a good deal of their arguments a bit murky and their evidence unconvincing. A number of professionals in their fields have penned critical reviews, arguing against many of their central propositions — including their thesis that small-scale aboriginal societies were not generally egalitarian. Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write, “Graeber and Wengrow ignore the new remarkable scholarship that describes the adaptation, or ecological niche, our primate ancestors and early humans found for themselves by becoming equal. This means they also eschew the classic anarchist and Marxist view that because humans had once been equal, there was hope we could be so again.” It seems bizarre that the authors wanted to refute this.

Perhaps more essentially, I felt there was a lack of perspective on the varieties of human consciousness itself. My own views in this matter have been shaped by direct experience (via psychedelics and shamanism), and works of authors including Julian Jaynes, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, and Julius Evola. I find it likely that human consciousness has undergone various mutations or phase-transitions across history and pre-history. Much of our past has occurred in states or “structures” (Gebser’s term) of consciousness very different from what we know today, in the postmodern world. Many ancient cultures and civilizations prioritized attaining occult or esoteric knowledge — direct transcendent experience — in ways we can’t, at this point, understand, due to our ideological framework.

These substantive changes in consciousness — if true — make it difficult to generalize about the distant past, based on archaeological remnants. I will explore this in more depth, later, in a follow-up essay. My interest is not academic: I agree with the authors that how we interpret the past shapes our views and hence our approach to the future.

As Patrick Harpur notes, “The world you see is the myth you are in.” We cannot avoid forming myths and narratives out of the past that influence our sense of agency. Knowing how easy it is to fall prey to delusions about the past based on our desires and fantasies, we must tread lightly.

“The colonist's direct observations of the political practices of the Iroquois Confederacy convinced them that power vested in the people actually produced a functional democracy. The concept of the pursuit of life and liberty are directly attributable to Native influences. However, where Europeans diverged from Indian political theory was in their conceptions of property; the Indian philosophy of communal landholding was diametrically opposed to the European idea of individual private property, and it was the protection of private property that would be the thrust of the Constitution.” (Thoughtco)

For me, the most valuable material in the book comes near the beginning. The authors make the case that Europe’s encounter with indigenous cultures in North and South America shocked European missionaries, colonialists, and, eventually, continental philosophes. This encounter deeply impacted Europe’s beliefs and values, eventually inspiring the Enlightenment and the 18th Century revolutions. “The terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory,” write Graeber and Wengrow. “And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World.” Sometimes, these debates included indigenous statesmen and intellectuals, who were invited to speak at salons in European capitals.

The new conceptions of freedom, equality, and fraternity proclaimed during the French and American Revolutions were, they argue, inspired by Europe’s contact with indigenous people in the Americas. Before that contact, there was little questioning of the Divine Right of Kings or Absolute Monarchies — although Renaissance humanism pointed in this direction. A number of Jesuit missionaries wrote lengthy, bestselling accounts of their adventures in the New World. Some of them realized that indigenous cultures were superior, in significant ways, to their own.

For example, Father Pierre Bayars, assigned to evangelize the Mi’kmaq in Novia Scotia, at the beginning of the 17th Century, wrote:

They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarreling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbor.” They are saying these and like things continually.

Brother Gabrial Sagard, a Recollect Friar, wrote about the Wendat nation (located in what was then “New France” and is now Canada) in 1630:

They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil disposition… They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages.

Other Jesuit missionaries bemoaned the “wicked liberty of the savages” — for instance, they were infuriated that unmarried indigenous American women appeared to “have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty” — which impeded them from “submitting to the yoke of the law of God.” The indigenous people disobediently refused to be ruled or controlled, and recognized no hierarchy. One Jesuit wrote about the Montagnais-Naskapi:

They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.

Given, it is perhaps unsurprising that indigenous people, forced into European acculturation, preferred to return to indigenous ways if given any opportunity. Europeans taken into indigenous society, on the other hand, usually stayed with their adopted community, given the choice. Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend:

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

These days, I find myself wrangling online with a group of mostly European and mainly male philosophers who believe that war, violence, and phallic displays are intrinsic to humanity and inescapable. They utterly reject any “Rousseau-ian” view of a more harmonious past (Rousseau is considered responsible for the popularization of the archetype of the “Noble Savage,” as well as the idea that private property was the origin of inequality). I was reminded of this group’s squabbles while reading the accounts of indigenous society presented in The Dawn of Everything. Here we find agents of European imperialism admiring, against their will, the superior elements of the “primitive” cultures they meant to colonize and conquer — including their lack of greed, violence, and envy, and the greater levels of social harmony and mutual aid enjoyed among the “Savages.” It does seem that Anglo-European Christianized conditioning — even its contemporary secularized form — contorts individual psychology, leading to forms of insecurity and selfishness unknown to the original Americans.

Graeber and Wengrow make another compelling point: Today our general attitudes toward sex, freedom, equality, and other subjects are much closer to those of the indigenous people of the 17th Century than to the Europeans who conquered them. This is part of a larger process we can try to understand. In some ways, it seems, the Anglo-European consciousness is slowly shedding its conditioning and turning back toward indigenous values and practices.

We find another example of this is, I believe, with the psychedelic renaissance: Altered state experiences considered sacred and essential to many indigenous cultures are now being reintegrated into our society, albeit mainly for relatively utilitarian purposes like mental health and cognitive enhancement. This is another crucial development that suggests a slow movement — a pendulum swing back — toward indigenous ideas and values. Perhaps we have much more to learn from indigenous forms of social and political organization that might help us redesign our society so it becomes more equitable and ecologically regenerative, and less destructive.

I will stop here for now.

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