The Dawn of Everything

Normally I blog about creative writing, but this was a great book:

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that convincingly rejiggers your entire understanding of something.Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus convinced me that the Americas were heavily populated before diseases wiped out 95% of Native Americans. Back in the day, Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies convinced me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and had feathers.

Here, the authors take aim at the idea that human societies inexorably grow from small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers to grain-based dictatorial bureaucratic states. Turns out the archeological record is full of bureaucratic states like Ur that were egalitarian and not dictatorial. Living at the same time as the brutal, dictatorial Aztecs were the Tlaxcala, who had a form of repubic; the people of Teohuatican avoided building temples and instead built housing. Peoples at all levels of social organisation have rejected big men. Iroquois leaders had no power to compel their people to do anything. Some hunter-gatherer bands mock the best hunters. Other people, like the native peoples of Southern California, have gone to great lengths to avoid building up surpluses of resources, and so have made war useless. Many peoples avoided agriculture for thousands of years even though they knew perfectly well how to do it.

Turns out folks are pretty smart and self-aware, and Western civilization is not the culmination of knowledge, but merely one particular way of living that has its pros and cons.

If you're looking for another "big think book," this is it.

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