Criticism of the book, ‘The Dawn of Everything’

Criticism of the book, ‘The Dawn of Everything’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

Wikipedia-1 : The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books).[1]

Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020.[2] Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography.[2] It was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2022).[3]

Drawing attention to the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization.[4] Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia.[5] It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.[2]

The Dawn of Everything was widely reviewed in the popular press and in leading academic journals, as well as in activist circles, with dividing opinions being expressed across the board. Both favorable and critical reviewers noted its challenge to existing paradigms in the study of human history.

The authors open the book by suggesting that current popular views on the progress of western civilization, as presented by Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence, but owe more to philosophical dogmas inherited unthinkingly from the Age of Enlightenment. The authors refute the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view on the origin of the social contract, stating that there is no single original form of human society. Moreover, they argue that the transition from foraging to agriculture was not a civilization trap that laid the ground for social inequality, and that throughout history, large-scale societies have often developed in the absence of ruling elites and top-down systems of management.

Eam Taekyoung : Humans have evolved in a direction optimized for hunting through perfect upright posture and relentless running, and have achieved optimal efficiency by minimizing the moment (force to rotate around a point) generated in the body during energy acquisition activities. This dramatically increased the efficiency of obtaining food for survival, which led to population growth (see research papers from Colorado State University and Washington University in St. Louis). However, as time passed, they faced the limits of food supply by hunting and gathering. Hunting is possible in flatlands such as the Serengeti in Africa, but in valleys, explosive agility is more important than persistence. In the end, it seems that the population growth and the expansion of the living area to the valley area due to this naturally flowed into the choice of accepting agriculture as an alternative to hunting and gathering.



Wikipedia-2 : Rejecting the "origins of inequality" as a framework for understanding human history, the authors consider where this question originated, and find the answers in a series of encounters between European settlers and the Indigenous populations of North America. They argue that the latter provided a powerful counter-model to European civilisation and a sustained critique of its hierarchy, patriarchy, punitive law, and profit-motivated behaviour, which entered European thinking in the 18th century through travellers accounts and missionary relations, to be widely imitated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. They illustrate this process through the historical example of the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, and his depiction in the best-selling works of the Baron Lahontan, who had spent ten years in the colonies of New France. The authors further argue that the standard narrative of social evolution, including the framing of history as modes of production and a progression from hunter-gatherer to farmer to commercial civilisation, originated partly as a way of silencing this Indigenous critique, and recasting human freedoms as naive or primitive features of social development.

Subsequent chapters develop these initial claims with archaeological and anthropological evidence. The authors describe ancient and modern communities that self-consciously abandoned agricultural living, employed seasonal political regimes (switching back and forth between authoritarian and communal systems), and constructed urban infrastructure with egalitarian social programs. The authors then present extensive evidence for the diversity and complexity of political life among non-agricultural societies on different continents, from Japan to the Americas, including cases of monumental architecture, slavery, and the self-conscious rejection of slavery through a process of cultural schismogenesis. They then examine archaeological evidence for processes that eventually led to the adoption and spread of agriculture, concluding that there was no Agricultural Revolution, but a process of slow change, taking thousands of years to unfold on each of the world's continents, and sometimes ending in demographic collapse (e.g. in prehistoric Europe). They conclude that ecological flexibility and sustained biodiversity were key to the successful establishment and spread of early agriculture.

Eam Taekyoung : 'Excessive energy accumulation' and 'speed of deepening energy distribution imbalance' are the speed of aging of individual life or individual social organism. As Harvard University biologist Bernd Heinrich puts it, "Eating extra calories means growing faster, maturing faster, and thus living a shorter lifespan." The difference between European settlers and Native American societies is that the social aging of European settlers was much faster than that of Native Americans. Meanwhile, the structure of human society has evolved in the direction of more sophisticated imitation of the human body and mind (brain). Rapid aging increased the sophistication of the social structure, which is an expression of imitation. It doesn't seem too difficult for a seasoned, aggressive society to take over a younger, less aggressive one.



Wikipedia-3 : The authors then go on to explore the issue of scale in human history, with archaeological case studies from early China, Mesoamerica, Europe (Ukraine), the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa (Egypt). They conclude that contrary to standard accounts, the concentration of people in urban settlements did not lead mechanistically to the loss of social freedoms or the rise of ruling elites. While acknowledging that in some cases, social stratification was a defining feature of urban life from the beginning, they also document cases of early cities that present little or no evidence of social hierarchies, lacking such elements as temples, palaces, central storage facilities, or written administration, as well as examples of cities like Teotihuacan, that began as hierarchical settlements, but reversed course to follow more egalitarian trajectories, providing high quality housing for the majority of citizens. They also discuss at some length the case of Tlaxcala as an example of Indigenous urban democracy in the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans, and the existence of democratic institutions such as municipal councils and popular assemblies in ancient Mesopotamia.

Synthesizing these findings, the authors move to discovering underlying factors for the rigid, hierarchical, and highly bureaucratized political system of contemporary civilization. Rejecting the category of "the State" as a trans-historical reality, they instead define three basic sources of domination in human societies: control over violence (sovereignty), control over information (bureaucracy), and charismatic competition (politics). They explore the utility of this new approach by comparing examples of early centralised societies that elude definition as states, such as the Olmec and Chavín de Huántar, as well as the Inca, China in the Shang dynasty, the Maya Civilization, and Ancient Egypt. From this they go on to argue that these civilisations were not direct precursors to our modern states, but operated on very different principles. The origins of modern states, they conclude, are shallow rather than deep, and owe more to colonial violence than to social evolution. Returning to North America, the authors then bring the story of the Indigenous critique and Kondiaronk full circle, showing how the values of freedom and democracy encountered by Europeans among the Wendat and neighbouring peoples had historical roots in the rejection of an earlier system of hierarchy, with its focus at the urban center of Cahokia on the Mississippi.

Based on their accumulated discussions, the authors conclude by proposing a reframing of the central questions of human history. Instead of the origins of inequality, they suggest that our central dilemma is the question of how modern societies have lost the qualities of flexibility and political creativity that were once more common. They ask how we have apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development, and how violence and domination became normalised within this dominant system. Without offering definitive answers, the authors end the book by suggesting lines of further investigation. These focus on the loss of three basic forms of social freedom, which they argue were once common: the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to reimagine and reconstruct one's society in a different form. They emphasise the loss of women's autonomy, and the insertion of principles of violence into basic notions of social care at the level of domestic and family relations, as crucial factors in establishing more rigid political systems. The book ends by suggesting that received narratives of social development are largely myths, and that possibilities for social emancipation can be found in a more accurate understanding of human history, based on scientific evidence that has come to light only in the last few decades.

Eam Taekyoung : Instability is the driving force behind the evolution of life and social organisms (organizations, nations, etc.). Nobel laureate in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine, said, "Irreversibility leads to instability, instability begets self-organization, and self-organization gives rise to life." In the same principle, desire (irreversibility) causes confusion (instability), confusion (instability) gives birth to the will to change (self-organization), and the will to change (self-organization) has conceived a new society (life).

All living beings walk the path of optimal efficiency in their own way. However, the path can be classified into two paths. The first way is to conform to the will (survival and reproduction) of the selfish genes (blueprints). The second way is to go beyond the will of this gene through metacognition. This is a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. ​ Socrates' words "Know thyself!" can be seen as the official starting point of metacognition and social evolution.

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