The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The subtitle of this chapter, “The indigenous critique and the myth of progress,” directs the reader’s attention to how Indigenous intellectuals (to use the authors’ term) responded to the European presence in their territories and beyond.

The authors begin by discussing the origin of the idea of social inequality, proposing that concerns about it only arose as Europe became involved in the “global economy,” through the processes of travel, conquest, and colonialism (28-29). Contrary to many prevailing narratives about this history, European thought was not monolithic or uninfluenced by Indigenous perspectives. Rather, numerous productive conversations and interactions occurred between the Indigenous Americans and European colonists (whether religious proselytizers or government administrators), and these impacted European thought, particularly Enlightenment-age thinking. They question the Rousseau-influenced notion that humanity once existed in a state of natural innocence wherein an ineffable kind of equality existed.

As an example of how the Indigenous critique impacted European thinking, the authors investigate the Wendat responses to the French Jesuit interlopers, concluding that “indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones” (41). This is because, contrary to conventional thinking, European ideas of the time were firmly opposed to personal liberty; one needed to be submissive to the ultimate higher power of God (which proscribed sexual freedoms, among other things), as well as to higher authorities on earth.

In fact, personal liberty was seen as “wicked” (hence the title of the chapter). In contrast, the Indigenous Americans organized their societies in ways that emphasized personal liberty rather than obedience to a centralized authority. These ideas would eventually get transferred back to Europe during the age of Enlightenment, as thinkers and revolutionaries began to extricate themselves from “arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy” (46).

Another example of the Indigenous critique is from the Wendat philosopher-statesman Kandiaronk. His views were recorded by the French aristocrat, Baron de Lahontan, in the extremely popular Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled, published in 1703. In the past, most scholars have dismissed the possibility that the conversation attributed to Kandiaronk truly represented his words or thoughts. However, the authors provide ample evidence to suggest that the views in the work are genuinely Kandiaronk’s, rather than an invented conversation by Lahontan.

They then reveal how Kandiaronk—referred to in the Dialogues as Adario—critiques the European obsession with private property and the punitive laws that must be devised “by a form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behavior” (53). Again, the Indigenous critique reveals the flaws within European society. The authors turn the Western gaze—“that rational, supposedly objective way of looking at strange and exotic cultures” (58)—back onto the Europeans themselves.

In response to the Indigenous critique, European authors, such as A. R. J. Turgot, return to Rousseau’s ideas: that hunter-gatherer societies were essentially egalitarian (but violent and disorganized), then agriculture and farming organizes society which allows for diversification of labor. This eventually led to cities and states and their attendant governments and policing mechanisms. This movement from pastoralism to urbanism also sees the advent of private property replacing communal property. In contrast to Indigenous American cultures, the “European conception of individual freedom was [. . .] tied ineluctably to notions of private property” (66). This gives rise to events such as the French Revolution, which is often (incorrectly, according to the authors) linked to Rousseau’s philosophy. The ideas underpinning the Revolution might very well have originated with the Indigenous critique instead.

Last, the authors address what they term “the myth of the stupid savage,” wherein Indigenous peoples are blissful in their innocent lack of knowledge about the workings of the world. The promulgation of this myth, the authors argue, was a way to create “a conceptual space where their [the Indigenous intellectuals’] judgements no longer seemed threatening” (73).

They return to the amorphous notion of equality—what would that really mean, in what arena, and for whom?—which they find both vague and potentially devoid of critical import: “It’s never entirely clear exactly what the term is supposed to refer to” (74). Instead, the authors suggest that to examine the root causes of social inequality “is really an inquiry into the origins of civilization” (75). This will be their focus in the chapters to come.

The authors begin this chapter, subtitled “In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics,” with a discussion about prehistory. They admit it is difficult to find hard evidence about the roughly three million years of prehistoric human culture, but that mythologizing and homogenizing that past misleads an understanding of the present. While there are differences among peoples today, they argue, these differences are miniscule when compared to the distant past, when Neanderthals and Denisovans roamed and interacted with Homo Sapiens. Their overarching point is that “there is no ‘original’ form of human society” (82). They proceed to explore what various prehistorical societies might have behaved like, debunking the notion that most early culture comes from Europe. This is the result of the relative wealth of European nations in the modern age, and increasingly, there is evidence about complex human societies in Asia, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, to name a few.

The authors take the view that prehistorical humans had complex thoughts and the capacity for self-reflection and self-direction. They examine archeological evidence that suggests that even hunter-gatherer societies came together to create burial sites and monumental structures; this indicates that there was a higher level of cooperation among such groups than previously thought, as well as the fact that there might have been social hierarchies involved, as opposed to the strictly egalitarian societies previously imagined. Still, the authors caution against drawing rigid conclusions: “Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let along anything remotely resembling ‘states’” (92).

Again, the authors address the issue of the intellectual capacity of prehistoric humans, citing the “sapient paradox” (see the Index of Terms) as a problematic stumbling block in the accounts of conventional history. This paradox notes that early humans decided to live as hunter-gatherers, much like tribes of monkeys, rather than organize themselves into societies even though they had the ability to do so. This leads back to the notion “that anyone classified as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality,’ or lived in a mythological dreamworld” (95). The authors intend to demonstrate that prehistorical humans possessed a highly astute political consciousness, that they were “in every sense self-conscious political actors” (100).

Using the work of the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the authors investigate the behavior of the Nambikwara tribe of the Amazon. This tribe, notably, moves between different social systems at different times of the year: they change “from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again” (100). Based on this evidence, the authors return to prehistorical societies to examine if this phenomenon might be present much further back in human history. What they discover is that the seasons play an enormous role in how early human societies are organized: “there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom,” as observed by Levi-Strauss in the modern era (106). It appears as if “human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities” (107).

Examining the behavior of Inuit tribes, Canada’s Kwakiutl tribe, and various Plains nation tribes, the authors demonstrate that social fluidity—switching between an egalitarian hunter-gatherer social organization and a hierarchical settlement community, for example—is a feature of many early human groups. Fluidity is advantageous: “With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in” (111).

Instead of asking why social inequality exists in the world today, the better question would be to ask why our social systems hardened into hierarchical organizations wherein social inequality is all but guaranteed to result. The flexibility of early human societies—and some outlier groups which still follow such arrangements—appears to have been abandoned at some point.

The authors ask, “How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species?” (115). They also note that the vestiges of this fluidity remain in certain seasonal celebrations and festivals, wherein values shift and roles reverse. For example, during the Christian holiday season, corporate advertisements advocate gratitude and gift-giving rather than “rabid commercialism” (115). Or they suggest that the role reversals that take place during various carnivals—king for a day, “women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters” (116)—reveal the vestiges of this former fluidity.

Finally, the authors insist that, from all this evidence, the beginnings of human history are neither strictly egalitarian nor inevitably hierarchical.