Nilesh Jasani's Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn makes many radical points but, in the end, turns out to be nihilistically pointless because of the methods they consciously or unwittingly deploy.

The authors comprehensively discredit theories of all types of well-known social commentators, historians, anthropologists, or economic historians based on the following single premise. However, this is not in their words.

Language tools, categorizations, framing, etc., that we use in studies now oversimplify the life that was. Rousseau to Pinker, Hobbes to Hariri, Pinker or Diamond, all celebrated thinkers, used later-day descriptions to tell us how some pre-historical communities lived in contrast to what emerged later to make their stories and conclusions. As per the book, what is painted is invariably simplistic, based on scant evidence, and never reflective of the complexities and diversities that existed over millennia of human life in all parts of the world.

The authors comprehensively show that there were no first farms, kings, cities, or even states that marked the beginning of some sort of modernity the way we are made to believe in these books. The archaeological proofs discussed in the book are no less patchy, though. The authors liberally debunk claims of others based on their conclusions of Mesoamerican societies of the last two thousand years or of Harappan/early Egyptian civilizations' archeological findings a few more thousand years before. The theories debunked are often for the communities living tens of thousands of years earlier everywhere.

The book's real arguments are more logico-rational and exceptionally well made, although one does not need any training in history, archeology, or anthropology for these discussions. The way human life or history evolved was never with any intentions, preordained path, or inevitability. The eras that we earmark as periods when many of the modern constructs are said to have emerged - like cities, ruling classes, farms, inequality, etc. - were extraordinarily prolonged periods whose realities famous theorists vainly and willingly generalize to build their narratives. As per the authors, and rightly so to a degree, the vacuity behind those famous sociological theories, stories, and conclusions- no matter how well known- becomes evident when one decides to objectively examine the details behind any claims made on any pattern in history.

One can take the book's arguments further, although this is not a point made by the authors. Whenever a historian of a later time (let alone those Hollywood moviemakers) tries to describe the life of people even a few thousand years before using modern tools at her disposal, she is doomed to misrepresent massively. Studies or conclusions built on top of such misrepresentations, as per the chain of thoughts adopted by the authors, serve little purpose. The authors pick only a handful of most famous claims to debunk, but the argument chain can discredit absolutely any claim made in these fields.

High school debaters master the technic of going after the definition of terms used by the opponents to score points. The terms we use - not just in spoken languages but even in sciences - can never adequately represent the reality they try to describe. The language-based and continuously evolving categorizations (say through abstractions like hypothalamus in a brain, electron in physics, internet, or even what we mean by a farm) provide a truncated description of reality. Constructs built on top may help us analyze some future problem or situation better, but they are far shakier when examined closely than typically implied by their proponents.

If, as the authors nearly conclude, all generalizations are wrong, and hence the narratives based on them, subjects like history are sucked out of any practical utility and reduced to a hobby. Observing events in atomized isolation is the only pure path under such schema as one assiduously avoids any language-based descriptions, which become definitionally violative. The real critique in the book is not towards opposing specific theories like claims on the origin of inequality with the exhortations for better theories in those realms. The arguments are against almost all theories. Clearly, pattern recognition cannot be so useless.