5 Key Teachings: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING, by David Wengrow & David Graeber

I love this dramatic retelling of our early pre-history, from an archaeologist and anthropologist (sadly, David Graeber died before publication). In it, they explore so many of the myths that inform the way we think about our slow, plodding path to dominance-based hierarchical cultures, and this idea that we may be stuck here, but it was definitely not a foregone conclusion. If you want a new way of thinking about the world, and particularly the ways in which indigenous cultures were so much more socially creative and inventive than we are today, this is a book that you'll love. The thesis that they prove is essentially this: "If the very essence of our humanity consists of the act that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?"

The Dawn of Everything is amazing! I have 29 pages of single-spaced notes, it was hard to pick which passages to include here.

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. “One must simplify the world to discover something new about it.” The world is incredibly complex, so complex it can be hard to discern patterns. As the duo point out, it’s important to reduce and then expand.

Wengrow and Graeber write: “Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Levi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.” (p. 21)

2. We take it for granted that “Western” travelers to the Americas were an early version of us. In fact, we would have found their ideologies incredibly foreign.