Our ancient ancestors may have been more civilized than we are

[Judi Lynn]

A new book offers a version of history in which we lived for thousands of years in large and complex societies without kings or cops

By Lev Bratishenko
October 18, 2021

We like to think of ourselves as living in scientific times, but what if the familiar story of “civilization” is mostly myth? This is the question asked in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a new book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. What began as the authors’ inquiry into the origins of the idea of inequality turned into something even more ambitious: an updated history in which we lived for thousands of years in large and complex societies without kings or cops.

In this telling, our ideas about prehistory and the inevitable rise of things like “the state” are actually repetitive misunderstandings of thought experiments by Rousseau and Hobbes. Stories we tell ourselves about why we live in a world shaped by domination and violence—that large groups of people can’t live in egalitarian societies, for example, or that material surpluses inevitably produce inequality—were true for many people in the past 2,000 years or so, but there were also thousands of years when this was not the case.

The idea that societies must “develop” according to rules of human behaviour was a response, say the authors, to a 17th-century encounter between European and Indigenous thought. Published dialogues with intellectuals like the Wendat leader Kondiaronk circulated in Europe and prefigured Enlightenment debates in form and style, but it was the Indigenous voices and not the European ones that argued for now familiar values like reason and freedom. The book claims that we’re still stuck with the European defence, which was to invent the idea of primitive societies to avoid facing Indigenous peoples as equals who had chosen a different path.

History becomes way more interesting once we think of our ancient ancestors as adults making careful decisions. Why aren’t the 5,000 years when farming did not lead to standing armies considered as significant as the 5,000 years when it did? What if times when societies rejected settlement or slavery were as important as when those phenomena emerged?

More:
https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/our-ancient-ancestors-may-have-been-more-civilized-than-we-are/

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Political Thought and the more rarely taught American Political Thought

should be required in college, as required as a second language or statistics. If we don't know government, how are we citizens?

That being said, The Enlightenment's Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke were grounded in logic and formed arguments from the tools they knew. Their thoughts were rather mechanistic - accept one premise, deduce another, and go from there. Their perceptions of a state of Nature was their theoretical starting point, and they never observed or read about such a state. So, yeah, they could have missed the whole construct by a country mile.

[Midnight Writer]

2. Ancient folk had to work together cooperatively to survive.

Everyone had a role in the survival of the group. If the group failed, its members were screwed.

In our modern society, you can be a total ass, screw over everyone you can, and still thrive. Competition is valued over cooperation.

Plus, many ancient societies were matriarchal. Next to basic survival such as food and shelter, reproduction was prioritized.

[stopdiggin]

3. equally skeptical

of contrasting (mythological) constructs of larger societies that naturally operated on 'peaceful' and 'cooperative' models - all the while sprinkled in with 'freedoms.'

[Paladin]

4. Not much of a standard we're setting... (nt)

[marble falls]

5. More civilized or not yet corrupted by the possibilities?

[Gruenemann]

6. Rousseau was right!