The question of where man went wrong has plagued philosophers for hundreds of years. In modern Western philosophy, the basic view of human nature has alternated between the fatalism of the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the romanticism of the 18th century Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Proffering superficial optimism in these understandably pessimistic times, anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and professor of comparative archeology David Wengrow, take an oddly Rousseauian view in their book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
They start out with the right question: “Were we always like this — war, greed, exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering — or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?”
The authors do not attempt to address the question however, but disingenuously try to counter the widespread pessimism about the human prospect with a feel-good story of human history centered on the first cities at the dawn of agriculture.
In what amounts to a whitewash of human history, Graeber and Wengrow exclaim: “A surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized along robustly egalitarian lines.”
They begin by stating the obvious: “The past cannot provide instant solutions for the crises and challenges of the present.” But from that clear premise they absurdly conclude, “What we need today is another urban revolution to create more just and sustainable ways of living.”
Their analysis is rife with wishful thinking. The archeological evidence for their claims is scant, and the philosophical soundness of their view of human nature is nonexistent.
They have a very similar view of human nature as another latter-day Rousseauian scholar, Dr. Luke Kemp, who blandly and blindly asserts, “People are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites.”
Kemp echoes George Monbiot’s facile claim that the root of the human crisis is “a billionaire death cult that has its fingers around humanity’s throat, which both causes and downplays our existential crisis.”
“It is the few people high in the dark triad of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism who fall into races for resources, arms and status,” Kemp superficially insists.
Thus in taking the usual romantic view of human nature, he marks man’s wrong turn at the time of the Agricultural Revolution, specifically the Bronze Age:
“There was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”
Jarringly, this worldview combines the Rousseauian romanticism of humans, living in nature, with the old characterization of nature as “tooth and claw.”
Concluding on a note of conventional cynicism, Kemp is pessimistic about our prospects. “I think it’s unlikely” humankind will avoid global collapse and catastrophe. “We’re dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics.”
The roots of where man went wrong are much older than that — in the emergence of “fully modern humans” about 100,000 years ago. Paradoxically however, this insight does not confer such pessimism.
Blaming particular groups, wherever one falls on the political spectrum, recapitulates man’s primeval “us vs. them” mindset, which either leads to or comes from a cynical view of nature and/or human nature.
Why is gaining insight into how man went wrong necessary for ordinary folks, rather than just pundits and scholars? After all, no explanation, however accurate, will change anyone, much less the basic, disastrous course of humankind.
Because gaining insight into how a single, supposedly sapient species, which evolved along with all other life in the seamless wholeness of nature, is bringing about climate collapse and the Sixth Extinction, would at least point us in the right direction for radical change — within ourselves.
Rousseau’s notion that “once upon a time we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childlike innocence, as equals,” was naive even in his time. Graeber and Wengrow, Monbiot and Kemp implicitly agree, and go even further. They vainly attempt to promote the idea that gross power and wealth disparities began solely with the emergence of ruling classes.
But that only begs the questions: If the roots of where “man” went wrong do not lie in the strong tendency toward self-centeredness and greed of human nature, how have the few been able to repeatedly dominate the many? And why, when one elite group is overthrown, is the pattern repeated throughout history?
The claim that humans didn’t actually go wrong, and that all we need to do is return to our indigenous ways, or to a model of humankind’s supposedly egalitarian first cities, simply doesn’t wash. Intergroup conflict certainly didn’t begin when cities emerged, nor even organized war.
So did man go wrong, or did nature go wrong in evolving Homo sapiens? After all, evolution gave us the supreme adaptive strategy of being able to consciously make separations from the seamless whole of nature at will. And that simultaneously produced the self and alienation, which were constrained during prehistory by living close to nature and by cohesive traditions.
Those constraints were loosened with agriculture and the first cities, and have been completely removed by high science and technology. Since the Industrial Revolution, human nature being what it is has been increasingly fragmenting the Earth and humanity all to hell.
Even so, the responsibility to change course belongs to the living generations. The unwise use of symbolic thought is the root of the human crisis. And the human brain has the capacity for consciousness not based on separation, symbol, memory and self.
No amount of knowledge will save us, and certainly not AI. We have the capacity for another, true order of consciousness, flowing from the brain’s potential for insight.
Not merely problem-solving insights, or new scientific insights adding to the accumulation of knowledge. Rather, self-knowing (not self-knowledge), which gives rise to a state of insight when thought is attentively, effortlessly still.
Then the mind is bathed in the silence and peace of being, instead of the need and greed of becoming.
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The “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by the two Davids Graeber and Wengrow is so much more than what LeFevre alleges. It’s a written seminar class that could serve as the basis for a lifetime of study. The footnotes alone with references to other major anthropologists, and archaeological studies is a bonus book in itself and completely overturns virtually everything Mr. LeFevre asserts here. I read this book cover to cover, including the footnotes as I went along, with an engaging prose style which one doesn’t expect in such a sweeping non-fiction work.
I think it is a monumental work, and a wonderful touchstone for framing the entire stretch of human history. David Graeber was an anarchist and has been criticized on that basis; but, realizing that about him doesn’t detract from the scholarship of what he and Wengrow published. There is no denying the depth and breadth of their knowledge or scholarship and their ability to put it on paper. Graeber and Wengrow add to our collective knowledge and provide an important critique of the anthropology and archaeology disciplines for failing to adequately communicate their discoveries to the public at large.
I think it’s easy to write a hatchet job review on anyone’s work. But LeFevre doesn’t bother to do that from a professional’s point of view. Internal wars constantly rage within any scientific disciplines. I am glad LeFevre chose to highlight this under appreciated book; but, his arguments and critiques are so distorted I can only conclude his essay here is more about LeFevre than it is about the subject book. I can only suppose his vituperation is a measure of how good The Dawn of Everything is about challenging us to see our history in a different light with all of the attendant physical evidence cited in the footnotes. If you’re interested in human history, how we got here and how this era seems to have come about, you would benefit from reading the Dawn of Everything.
Just read an unfortunate reaction to my column on April 26th, “Revisiting where man went wrong.” It manages to completely miss the point on one hand, and ironically makes the point on the other that scholarly analysis of the human condition is inherently incapable of meeting the unprecedented challenge of our era.
The “vituperation” is the reader’s out of his attachment to an academic book, which ignores the underlying causes of the polycrisis that I point to and seek reader engagement with in “Meditations.”
Rather than give consideration to the questions and insights I pose, and examine his worldview, the reader assumes the primacy of knowledge over insight and understanding. (Indicated by grating over-intellectualized references to “seminar class,” “depth and breadth of knowledge,” “lifetime of study,” “collective knowledge,” “scholarship,” etc.).
Ad hominem aside (“more about LeFevre than it is about the subject book,” though the book is a small part of this column), the reader was clearly most offended by my stating that no amount of knowledge will save us. I admit to not reading his newfound bible from “cover to cover,” but the question stands: Where did Homo sapiens go wrong? That’s a philosophical question, which no amount of anthropological and archeological knowledge can address.