Preface. It is likely that all world oil, both conventional and unconventional, peaked in 2018. The good news is that this means there isn’t enough carbon left to turn the world into a hothouse extinction, though for centuries the planet will be plenty miserable with rising sea levels, heat waves, and crazy weather lowering crop production. Fossil decline also means we won’t be able to get every last fish out of the oceans, erode topsoil and turn the world into a desert, cut down all the (rain)forests and continue to pollute land, air, and water with toxic chemicals.
But after this calamity occurs, the book “Dawn of Everything” offers great hopes based on past societies of our ability to create far better ways of living and has dozens of examples of how people did so in the past.
When Earth has far fewer people, it will be possible for people to flee slavery, war, hunger, autocrats and more to start their own society or join one with more freedom. In the past politically aware people in tribes and cities designed their governance and way of life to avoid getting their food exclusively from agriculture and losing their freedom to autocratic kings.
A great deal has been discovered in the past 30 years in anthropology and archeology, and many new ancient civilizations discovered. You may already know about some of them from Charles Mann’s “1491” or Preston’s “The Lost city of the Monkey God”, civilizations and cities every bit as complex, populated, and sophisticated as in Europe. This book will introduce you to even more new discoveries, to better ways of life and governance, interesting ways of living, and above all freedom.
Agriculture is seen by many as an unfortunate path we’ve taken, just read Scott’s “Against the Grain” to understand why agriculture is such a calamity. But in “Dawn of Everything” you’ll see that there were societies which avoided year-round agriculture on purpose, or just grew some of their food in addition to hunting and gathering. Many lived seasonally in one place for celebrations with thousands of others, and the rest of the year as hunters and gatherers, each of these two ways of living with different rules of governance.
The Dawn of Everything concludes:
“In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others?
We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant.
Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating how we view past societies, to remind us that people did actually live in other ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labor never had to happen.
But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”
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I would love to know what they would say about the role fossil fuels has had on our societies the past 500 years.
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, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Graeber D, Wengrow D (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
There are three primordial freedoms, which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.
This is not a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.
To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators
Our aim in this book is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has anything like a complete set.
The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table. Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1% of the world’s population own 44% of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others.
The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property.
The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.
We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.
When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Paleolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish). If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Paleolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening
Searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’
How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?
We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.
If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns?
Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.