I’d read a lot of anthropology decades ago so much of “Dawn” sounded right and plausible.  But it seemed too good to be true, and I’ve been looking since then for criticism. Much of what I’ve found was full of straw man arguments and dense bureaucratic language that was hard to understand.

But the podcast by Daniel Bitten (aka WorldWideScrotes) , “What is Politics” (transcripts here) is quite good, and makes me feel a bit dumb not to have seen the many flaws in “Dawn”. Though I don’t regret reading it — much is true and it was fascinating to learn about past societies.

I really liked “Dawn of Everything” because it gave me great hope that based on societies that existed in the past, we could invent better societies in the future after collapse, since I think women will suffer a great deal as we’re seeing in Afghanistan and in the U.S. our own wannabe Taliban evangelist Republicans taking away our rights to our future. I shudder to think if I’d had a baby in high school, had to live with Mom & Dad because I couldn’t get an abortion, rather than go to college, get the hell out of flat, overcast, too hot-too cold Chicago, travel all over the world, and fall madly in love with my husband in San Francisco 38 years ago (and still feel that way).

“Dawn” gave me hope that we could go back to being hunter-gatherers and avoid agriculture, which inevitably leads to hierarchy and slavery, and women having few rights, far closer to being slaves than human beings.

This podcast explains why we probably lived in egalitarian matriarchal societies for most of human history the past few hundred thousand years until the Holocene and a great deal more, I’m only going to write about a few of the criticisms from the first 4 episodes.

Bitten sees the world Politically. Power is politics — who gets to steer resources to favored people or wage war.

Though he points out that for probably 95% of our existence, we didn’t have hierarchies and lived in egalitarian bands day to day. Authoritarians couldn’t take control because people would leave for other bands, which DNA has shown to be mostly unrelated to one another, and membership probably varied quite a bit as well as people joined or moved to other bands.  And once we had throwable weapons, muscle power no longer mattered as much. Weak men or coalitions could kill violent leaders, and over time we domesticated ourselves. Sara Hrdy believes equality was also due to women jointly rearing unrelated children, not the “Man The Hunter” fantasy that grabbed attention in the 60s. We probably moved around a lot because the climate was so unstable for most of our existence and got really good at being jack-of-all-trades and glaciers and forests came and retreated.  Then 12,000 years ago climate stabilized when the Holocene arrived and agriculture and herding became more tenable.

Graeber & Wengrow never attempt to answer how we came to have hierarchies. How can you reinvent society and prevent them if you don’t know why they occur?

Bitten answers that basically, hierarchies form when it is possible to control a resource, such as when related males banded together to defend their herds from being stolen, in turn leading to patriarchal societies and women moved to tribes with few or no relations and hence had less political power.

One of the ideas in “Dawn” was that if someone didn’t like their band they could leave and join another band, or start their own, and even when hierarchical civilizations developed, people could flee or quit their work to grow their own food.

But in today’s world of 8 billion people, fleeing is not an option for most. Now, if you don’t have great skills, you can’t quit, how will you pay the bills? Those at the top of hierarchies have many ways of forcing people to work, such as when Britain passed the Enclosure act and took common land away from villagers, forcing millions of them to move to cities to earn a living in industrial factories.  Garrett Hardin wrote that right-wingers encourage immigration and ban abortion to drive wages down and force people to take shitty jobs.  Nor can many escape by growing their own food now that massive industrial farms own the best farmland, and out West, the water rights too.

“Dawn” implies there are many ways to organize societies to solve problems, but really the same kinds of societies and hierarchies arise over and over again.  There weren’t a lot of options the Vikings could choose for instance. When they could no longer grow enough food on the  disappearing soils of Greenland, they could either learn to live like the Inuits, go back to Scandinavia, or die trying to farm.

Several societies are mentioned in Dawn that showed flexibility by rotating between two lifestyles, one hierarchical and one egalitarian to take advantage of seasonal resources. But this wasn’t a play-acting game. The resources determined governance. For example, the Inuit in the summer had to widely scatter in small family groups to survive since food was so dispersed. During that time the male was the absolute and unquestioned leader, because with survival on a razor’s edge, it makes sense to have a leader to make quick decisions.  But in winter, when food was concentrated, dozens of families congregated in the same place. Women could escape to other igloos, leave their husband, be defended by relatives from abuse, and live a much freer egalitarian life.  Material resources often determine social structure.

In summary, hierarchies arise whenever a group can monopolize a resource. If power is politics, then in today’s world, leftists want egalitarian societies, and right wingers prefer hierarchy.

I don’t agree entirely with all the criticisms in the podcast “What is Politics”, it is very intelligent and Bitten is widely read in anthropology and calls out several mistakes in the book. But he very much sees the world through a political lens.  So far there are 4 episodes on the first few chapters of Dawn, it will probably take him a year or more to finish his critique since it takes him 4-6 weeks per chapter to put together.  So I’ll probably add to this post as he does so. But listen to the podcasts if these topics are of interest, I am only writing about a small subset of what he has to say.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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