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It Hasn't Always Been This Way: A Review of The Dawn of Everything [1]

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Date: 2023-02-15

The Dawn of Everything is a hard book to review. Not because it is poorly written or uninteresting or lacking in relevance to today's world. Quite the opposite all points. For a book that covers such a breadth of history and topics with so few definitive answers, the book is fascinating, well written and completely relevant to the large problems of the modern day. No, the problem is that many of the critiques of the book hinge on areas of interpretation that I am simply not qualified to comment upon. I honestly don't know how much of the archeology they are interpreting correctly -- the evidence seems to reasonably support their conclusions. And while many of the criticism I have read come at their criticism from a purely political bent, there have been some apparent good faith ones that claim their interpretation is incorrect for technical reasons that I cannot judge. So, it is hard for me as a layperson to know how much weight to give their arguments.

Having said that, though, I still think the book is worth reading. First, because I have not read any credible criticism that claims they are wrong in one of their central theses -- that the idea that human society has progressed and must have progressed from idyllic egalitarian bands of hunter gathers through despotic cities ruling hapless farmers to the equally despotic late capitalism we find ourselves in today is just so much bunk. The authors take us on a wild ride through history, showing us that at all stages, human beings have had wildly varied social structures, ranging from egalitarian to despotic -- that there has been nothing pre-ordained about the world we live in today. Hunter gathers could be vicious tyrants and large cities supported by farmers could build social housing for all as easily as they could build temples to the glory of some twit's ego.

The two authors, one now sadly deceased, lay out the three aspects of societal control and how they believe those aspects have interacted throughout history to create conditions that allowed humans to slide from freedom to tyranny and back again during all periods of our technological development, at all places in the world. One of the stronger critiques, in my mind, is the argument that the authors are too prone to dismissing systematic causes for societal problems. I do not think this is the case -- throughout the book they show how the structure of a given society and how it privileges certain combinations of those societal aspects at a given time leads to specific outcomes. It is not that they dismiss structural factors, merely that they believe such factors are heavily influenced by the collective choices of the people who make up that society. Nothing, they believe, is pre-ordained.

And they make a very good case, based on their interpretation of the available archeological and historic records. The world has been a much more female driven, culturally varied, and societally mixed place than we give it credit for. If nothing else, this book will give a greater appreciation for not only how varied human society has been through history, but also how much various societies have been able to influence others. The cases here can sometimes feel like a stretch (it seems a bit silly to argue that the Enlightenment existed only as a response to Native American critiques of European society given that the authors themselves show how tumultuous European society had been in the centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, for example) but it is clear that there has been much more cross-pollination of ideas than we are generally given to understand.

I recommend the book, then. It is a fascinating reexamination of several ideas that we take for granted in our popular culture -- most importantly that society has been a pre-ordained progression toward late-stage capitalism and therefore must look as it does. It hasn't been. We don't need to go backwards to have a better world, and we don't need to pretend that things have to be the way they are if we don't want to run down antelope on foot for dinner. Things can be different, and they always could have been. Because they always have been, for worse and for better. Even if the book is wrong in some particulars, the overall case is strong and demands we look at the world with a different set of eyes.

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