Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles. Who does not remember Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years or Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind? But equally often, these books rapidly show their age and are criticized for oversimplifying matters. And so I found myself with The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 692-page brick with an equally grandiose title. In what follows, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, written by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published in Europe by Allen Lane in October 2021 (hardback, 692 pages)

I see two important reasons. First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments. More importantly, rather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths. The authors want historians to ask different and better questions, and they critically examine the many assumptions that underlie popular narratives of human history. In this, they succeed spectacularly, and this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking. As usual, I can only touch on some of the larger themes here.

The authors start by tracing the origins of our ideas about human history to the indigenous critique of European civilization. Sorry, the what? Perhaps old hat to seasoned readers of history books, this was one of those intriguing angles on history that was new to a lay reader such as myself. See, Europe was historically a minor player on the world stage and many non-Europeans considered it “an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who […] were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics” (p. 29). Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas. More importantly, it led to an explicitly racist backlash that saw indigenous people as the lowest rung on the ladder of progress. Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa! Except, the authors point out, this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.

“The authors want historians to ask different and better questions, and they critically examine the many assumptions that underlie popular narratives of human history.”

Take agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses. In Neolithic Central Europe, invading farmers went through demographic boom-bust cycles that ultimately approached a regional collapse, rather than a continuous expansion. In the Amazon, people tended to what effectively could be called jungle gardens that Europeans did not even recognize for what they were, leading to the myth of jungles as pristine areas untouched by human hands. In the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, people practised the labour-light variant of flood-retreat agriculture on seasonally flooded wetlands, while hunting and foraging at other times. Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.

The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision. Admittedly, these early conclusions were understandable: past archaeologists focused on areas where the domestication of plants and animals was later followed by the rise of large, politically centralized societies. But correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology. Their combination of flood-retreat agriculture, fishing, and a steady supply of organic construction materials such as mud and reed even suggests that “extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization” (p. 287). And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states. These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.

“the indigenous critique of European civilization […] led to an explicitly racist backlash that saw indigenous people as the lowest rung on the ladder of progress. Its legacy […] is the modern textbook narrative.”

A unifying theme in these and other topics is that, according to Graeber & Wengrow, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists seem to wilfully ignore what is staring them in the face (and this is one of the most important messages of this book): humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands. The archaeological record is understandably biased to stuff that is easily preserved, but more careful excavation methodology and new technologies such as LiDAR and ancient DNA reveal a past that is far more varied than we have allowed for. There is more to history than the rise and fall of empires. Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?'” (p. 115). A good answer to that question is not forthcoming, however, and if the final chapter in their book attempts to answer it, it was a bit of a muddle to me.

Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two. The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different. Graeber & Wengrow here extend this from individuals to whole societies, giving numerous examples. The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics. Our current states combine these three, and thus we have state-endorsed violence in the form of law enforcement and armies, bureaucracy, and the popularity contests we call elections in some countries, and monarchs, oligarchs, or tyrants in other countries. But looking at history, there is no reason why this should be and the authors provide examples of societies that showed only one or two such forms of control. Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states” (p. 382).

“A unifying theme [is that] humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis […]”

As a final note, part of the reason why this book resonated so much with me is that, as an evolutionary biologist, is see many parallels with discussions in my field. Where Graeber & Wengrow take issue with the teleological trap many historians fall into (only focusing on the outcome of history while skipping over what happened in between), biologists still have to fight the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Where they object to the constant use of prefixes such as “pre-” and “proto-“, implying that centuries of human development were not “proper” history, I see parallels with what Panciroli and Brusatte have written about “archaic” mammal groups that went extinct: these were not failures or evolutionary dead-ends but were very well-adapted to their environment during their lifetimes, thank-you-very-much. Where they question anthropologists taking today’s remaining hunter-gatherers as valid proxies for how our ancestors lived, primatologists still have to remind us that today’s chimpanzees are not our ancestors but evolved alongside us. And when they point out how e.g. the basic principles of agriculture were known long before they were applied systematically, this sounds like the historical equivalent of Neil Shubin’s argument that “biological innovations never come about during the great transitions they are associated with“. All this should come as no surprise; palaeontology and evolutionary biology are also historical disciplines and, the authors add, Darwin’s ideas influenced social theories about human history.

The Dawn of Everything is a huge and sprawling bombshell of a book. I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question… the book is admittedly a tad long in places and yet the writing is clear and accessible. There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralled. It is tragic that Graeber passed away in September 2020 before the book was published. As Wengrow writes in his foreword, they had plans for three sequels, covering parts of the world they decided to omit here such as Africa, Australia, and the Pacific. If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Postscript: Thanks to the various readers who have commented since this review went live and linked me to critical reviews of this book. Other than the links in the comments section below, I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos (if you have six hours to burn…). If you got the feeling my review overlooked some things, having watched his videos it seems there are some critical questions I did not consider. Will this book stand the test of time better than other big history books, as I wrote in the beginning? I am curious to see Wengrow’s response to the various critiques.

The Dawn of Everything

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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This review is one half of a two-parter. Against Democracy has been sitting on my shelves for a while now. After I recently received a review copy of Roslyn Fuller’s book In Defence of Democracy, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally read it. Two books, two opposing viewpoints, two reviews, back-to-back.

Against Democracy, written by Jason Brennan, published by Princeton University Press in September 2017 (paperback, 312 pages)

As the title of this book already suggests, Jason Brennan (a Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University) here offers a strident critique of democracy and argues in favour of epistocracy: a rule of the knowledgeable. Pull up your comfortable debating chair, because things are about to get controversial.

Brennan’s argument

Universal suffrage (an expensive way of saying the right to vote for everyone) is a hard-won freedom denied to many until not so long ago. Surely, it is a proud achievement? Of course, Brennan concedes, democracy beats most other forms of governance we have tried (dictatorships, oligarchies, etc.), but can we do better? Despite the strongly-worded title, Brennan does not know for sure there is a better alternative, but we ought to try and find out. And if there is one, then we ought to practice it. That alternative could very well be a rule by the knowledgeable – an epistocracy. Why? Because, Brennan writes, most people are ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists.

Against Democracy first charts how bad the situation is (quoting political theorist Jeffrey Friedman: “The public is far more ignorant than academic and journalistic observers of the public realize“) and lays bare the irrationality, tribalism, and cognitive biases affecting voters. Some of this feels questionable – is your ability to recall factoids really a good proxy for political knowledge? – and Fuller makes minced meat of these arguments in In Defence of Democracy. After this, Brennan spends a significant chunk of the book disarming three so-called proceduralist arguments often used to defend democracy. What they share is to claim that there is something intrinsically just about democracy. The going here gets quite technical, so without going into too much detail: democracy ennobles us, empowers us, and signals and expresses respect for us. Brennan finds fault with all three.

I found the first argument, that political participation would ennoble us, particularly interesting. Notably, many theorists argue for some form of a deliberative democracy, where voters come together to discuss and debate. Fuller, for example, promotes an Athenian-style direct democracy. Despite her confidence in voters, I have my doubts about the competencies of the average citizen. Brennan argues the empirical track record is terrible: such debates polarize, are frequently unbalanced, depend on manipulation and status, and rarely achieve consensus.

“If we agree that children should not have a vote because they have no idea what they are doing, why does this not apply to other groups?”

Having made the claim that there are no good reasons to prefer democracy over epistocracy on proceduralist grounds, Brennan continues to see if there are reasons to prefer epistocracy over democracy. He argues we have the right to a competent government. If we agree that children should not have a vote because they have no idea what they are doing, why does this not apply to other groups? Similarly, we demand our doctors and judges to be knowledgeable and competent, to study and pass exams. Why should this be any different for voters, whose choices have consequences that affect us all? I will admit that, superficially, this line of reasoning sounds incredibly appealing to me.

A final chapter then examines various forms that an epistocracy could take. In essence, Brennan proposes several variations where we either take voting power away from people deemed too ignorant, or give more voting power to those deemed sufficiently knowledgeable. But many things would remain untouched: there would still be elections where we choose representatives, and we would still have to choose between political parties.

So far, so good. Brennan’s presentation of his arguments is clear: he introduces what he is going to talk about, talks about it, and then summarises what he just talked about. Frequent bullet-point lists clearly structure the text. Even for someone like myself who lacks a background in political philosophy, I found I could follow Brennan’s line of thought and only occasionally had to look up some jargon.

Logical gaps, curious omissions, and tough questions

But what of the arguments themselves? Here I was, to my surprise, ultimately less convinced. There are some glaring logical gaps, curious omissions, and tough questions thrown up by this book.

I will highlight two things that seemed illogical to me. First, Brennan agrees with empirical democratic theorists who point out that democracies actually function quite well, despite an uninformed public. “There are a large number of “mediating factors” that prevent the electorate from getting its way“. But if voters are not that influential anyway, what difference will an epistocracy make? Second lapse in logic: the comparison with doctors and such falls flat because they actually apply their knowledge themselves. The electorate does not, they choose politicians who do, so that would shift the competency burden to politicians. If democracy fails, isn’t this rather a case of incompetent politicians? In defence, Brennan claims that low-quality electorate delivers poor-quality candidates.

This brings me to what I consider two omissions. First, the book is US-centric but never stops to consider how broken the US political system is. Politics divides us, says Brennan. It is a zero-sum game where for someone to win, someone else has to lose. It turns us into situational enemies, the way Roman gladiators are unwillingly pitted against each other in a fight to the death. But in a two-party system with first-past-the-post voting, what else do you expect? Many of the objections to democracy given in chapter 9 would not go away in an epistocracy: they are a problem not of dumb voters but of a broken system. Second omission: his claim that money has little influence on politics just seems naive. This was a major point in Beasts and Gods, though Brennan refers to Martin Gilen’s work in Affluence and Influence. He is not convinced by that work and mentions the existence of a large body of literature showing that campaign contributions barely impact political outcomes. I am obviously no expert in political philosophy, but this sounds unlikely. What of all the special interest groups, think tanks, and other lobbyists representing wealthy and powerful corporations that erode laws and legislation? You do not have to look hard to find scandals. If one author points to a body of research saying A, and another points to a body of research saying B, then either someone is cherry-picking or the matter just is not that clear-cut as either would like.

“Many of [Brennan’s] objections to democracy […] would not go away in an epistocracy: they are a problem not of dumb voters but of a broken system.”

Then, two tough questions. First – and this is no doubt a really big one for many readers – what knowledge actually matters? Who is knowledgeable? And who decides on this? Brennan provides sketches here. It could be that voters have to pass a citizenship exam, or pass an economics and political science exam, or pass a test for a proxy of such knowledge, such as solving logic and mathematics problems. Clearly, this needs developing. To me, it sounds that the level of knowledge he would consider sufficient would take away voting rights from the vast majority. Second tough question: Brennan proposes running experiments with small-scale epistocracies, e.g. on state level. By what metric would you judge its success? How would you know it is performing better than a democracy?

Finally, Brennan highlights the risk that taking away voter rights will reinforce existing segregation and discrimination, though he thinks this points to underlying problems that we should fix. “If epistocracy, warts and all, performs at all better than democracy, warts and all, than we should have epistocracy. I am not arguing, and need not argue, that epistocracy will be wart-free“. Though in an academic debate this is a reasonable defence, it will likely not go down well with many and be seen as glib elitism. I think we should first address those underlying injustices before we start excluding voters. Why insist on being divisive? Why not rather make yourself strong for being inclusive and trying to raise everyone’s proverbial boat? Brennan will no doubt reply that excluding dumb voters will result in better decisions, which will achieve just that, but I am not so sure. History teaches us that oppressors rarely have the well-being of the oppressed at heart.

Conclusion: against or in defence of democracy?

Having now read both books, how do they compare? Brennan’s is certainly the more academic read of the two, though clearly structured. Ironically, Fuller and Brennan have one thing in common: they both agree that democracy, as it is currently practised, is broken. But they diverge as to the problem and the solution. Brennan argues people are the problem, and a rule of the knowledgeable the answer. Fuller argues the system is the problem, and mass-participation the answer. It reminds me a bit of the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, where each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and gives a different description of it. Democracy obviously being the elephant here.

On balance, I lean more towards Fuller’s ideas, though a hybrid approach might well be needed. I do think voter ignorance is a huge problem, but, compared to the other problems Fuller highlights in Beasts and Gods, not to the extent that Brennan makes it out to be. I will agree with Brennan’s point that we should not be shy about picking whatever works best (in turn opening a whole new can of worms about metrics for this, which is another topic).

Reviewing In Defence of Democracy and Against Democracy back-to-back was an intellectually stimulating and surprisingly fun exercise. It was both interesting and mildly disconcerting to observe my own opinion on the topic swaying first in one and then another direction. This goes to show that on a topic where there are no absolutes it is a worthwhile exercise to seek out contrasting viewpoints, so I recommend both books.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Against Democracy paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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