Our Evolutionary Freedoms

My reflections on The Of The Dawn of Everything

Dec 22, 2023

A reader wrote that he was reading David Graebe’s last work, co-authored with David Wengrow, and he found a lot of similarities in that book with some of my own ideas. I was unaware of this book, and I did not know there was a last book. So I was thankful. But even prior to this book I must admit I have been heavily influenced by David Graeber’s work, and any similarities are because I have cribbed a lot of Mr. Graeber’s concepts and presented many of his ideas as mine. I believe I have mentioned him a few times, but perhaps I should give more credit to my indebtedness to Mr. Graeber.

The Technological Determinism Myth

A good portion of Dawn Of Everything is explaining that the idea that man’s history was progression through technological is really historical myth and not historical evidence. In other words, there’s a lot of evidence and it can be discovered that technological determinism (history progresses through time as man’s knowledge increases) is untrue. Mr Graeber has consistently pointed that out. In this work, co-author David Wingrow is an architectural scientist and as added a new level to the discuss with the introduction of structures and habitats into the mix. It’s not exactly new that there were many larger communities that existed pre-history (the development of writing that allowed history to be recorded. It is known that writing came into existence with kingdoms that were hierarchically arranged. They needed to keep records to know what they were accessing. And then writing became the author of the myths, instead of the oral transference of the cultural myths.

The falsity of technological determinism is not that simple technologies do not build into more complex technologies, what Graeber & Wingrow point out is that there is not a straight line curve for technological progression, and they question whether it is always really “progress”. The thing is when technology arises with need and knowledge is shared that is rather a good thing, because needs are furthered and knowledge is transmitted freely Of the myths of those who believe in linear historical progressions that is pointed out by the authors is the vast amount of movement (migration) between communities and trading networks where new technologies, cultural ideas, and community structural organizations were transferred. There was little concept that knowledge was owned, and it is doubtful there was any real conceptualization of ownership whatsoever.

We have known for a while about Taxila and Çatalhöyük, and there were other “cities” long before the hierarchical kingdoms. While the authors don’t directly discuss the issue because no one to date has found any direct any convincing evidence of hierarchical governments in these prehistorical communities, at least at their founding. Some archaeologists suggest they might have been later developments towards hierarchies. If that is true, it might be that people did not except those hierarchies and departed. But I believe the authors have themselves slipped into a region of somewhat murky territory here.

When these cities were first discovered there was some incorrect interpretations that everything was shared equally. At Çatalhöyük when the first layers were discovered they seemed to show apartments of similar size and then common facilities for cooking, eating etc. But then it was discovered that the smaller abodes weren’t built atop larger “apartments” that contained greater adornments. Yet I don’t suppose this necessarily means a great deal. This is the historical myth of “equality” that the authors point out. Equality was not about how much one possessed, it was not necessarily the leaders who collected the wealth, although sometimes they did. Equality was not assumed by what one possessed or by leaders who had more power than others, equality was the equality of power, the equality of the individuals within the community. The abandonment of Çatalhöyük is mysterious because it seemed to exist around 10,000 B.C.E. And it is from the most recent excavations seem to suggest a hierarchy might have been developing. But Taxila? I can’t refute the author’s claims, and there are unproven legends of Taxila being much older, but I did a brief bit of research and couldn’t confirm a date before 1000 B.C.E. But David Graeber’s scholarship was not questioned by the reviewers (with few exceptions) but some challenged the authors interpretation. There were some quite large cities developed by American natives (well into the historical era) in Florida, but evidence suggest these natives, along with the Creek, may have been the only North American hierarchical cities. If you’re interested, these Florida tribes may have invented the first sports “league. The games seemed to have been held on a regular seasonal schedule, the curious league aspect is that they played a series of contests and the winner was determined by winning the most contests. The end had political consequences, cities and territories could be won or lost. Participants who won,earned power and territory of their own, the losing participants could be sacrificed to gods. Originally their seemed to be three kingdoms, but the central kingdom ended up being swallowed by the other two.

The authors rely heavily on somewhat larger north American cities that arose. I agree that these were not hierarchical cities, But the development of Onaquaga, for instance, was due to some tribal displacements caused by the colonial invasion of some native lands that forced them to move into a closer living federation. The Tuscarora became the 6th Iroquois Nation around 173o and moved next to the Oneida villages. The Nanticoke relocated after being removed from their tribal ans imply assimilated into the Oneida. The colonists referred to Onaquaga as a city, but in actuality it was several villages who had simply moved into proximity due to forced displacement. I don’t want to propose my knowledge is somehow greater, but the primary city building I had always thought due to circumstances other than the author’s interpretation, and with the exception of Çatalhöyük, these cities seem to have been established within the historical era, even if these people didn’t keep historical records. But they are correct, at least as far as I am aware, that these cities were not established as hierarchies. I’m just not quite certain they were out of “choice” or whether they grew out of necessity.

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The Three Freedoms

Here is where the book excels in my opinion. It defines the original nature of human freedom under three broad scopes. Now the authors define three freedoms, but they are broad freedoms, or should I say “categories” of freedom that they believe were simply “assumed” to be what freedom meant to early man. I believe I have discussed all three in greater degree in my prior columns, so I can summarize here and refer you to my own archive, The authors propose, and I believe they are correct, that we still carry those freedoms in our genetics. In other words, we can’t define them as the freedoms we seek, but they are the freedoms when denied, that create the conflicts within our society. Now before I mention the three freedoms (and these concepts have garnered the greatest dissent against the book–either they are wrong or they are too ill-defined, according to the book’s critics), but of course they are ill-defined, because when freedoms become defined they become limited by the definition, and we stretch them into specific rights we need to be granted to suggest freedom.. But the freedoms the authors contend were essential to the evolutionary survival of early man were not expected freedoms but assumed freedoms within our genetics.

My quibble is not with that concept. I can’t proclaim a time when I did not assume the very freedoms they write about, but then as I’ve written in many of my early essays, my parents never defined my freedoms or my restrictions, and I just took these three freedoms for granted. No, my quibble is that the authors seemed to assume there were no conflicts. The freedoms did prevent some conflict, but because of what they are; they are conflictual. The very freedoms necessary for successful human existence, therefore are the very elements that lead to our conflicts.

The first freedom they suggest is the freedom to disobey. If you cannot disobey the society crumbles into disobedience. Only with the freedom to disobey can people come together and of necessity be forced to give each individual the equality of power. So developing a community has to come from the consensual agreement of everyone. Without that consensus, the ruler has no authority because his (often her) authority really does come only if the community agrees to his leadership. Because there is a need to maintain the society by the consent of the society, ritual becomes a necessary superceding authority over any leader who must follow the rituals that limited their power and granted the power back to the community through its rituals. So it is really difficult to equate such a leader to a king or president, or their like. That is why Malinowski coined the term “big man”, I suppose. That is why Americans never quite understood how to approach Natives to “purchase” land or seek peace. They couldn’t really deal with the Natives on a leader to leader peerage system. Because any members could simply leave—

Because the right to migrate, or leave is the second freedom. Children abused, mistreated, unhappy, in their homes are “runaways” and not treated very well. The neighboring town (or big city) doesn’t welcome them into the community. There is the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, I’m sure every one knows the rudiments. The thing is this story is based on an ancient law of hospitality. It’s not exactly a fiction out of the author’s mind, but is itself a tale of the decay of stability when the neighbor abuses the stranger. In the Biblical story of course God burns the towns to the ground. But the story has a rather strange ending that no one quite seems to understand today. It doesn’t even appear the Jewish writer who incorporated the tale really seems to understand what the legend was actually saying. God, the authority, says don’t look back or you will be punished. But when Lot’s wife looks back she is turned into a pillar of salt. But what is missed is the significance of the salt. Salt was the preservation of life, the only preservative besides fermentation, but some foodstuffs couldn't be fermented. Beef in the middle eastern climate needed salt because fermentation alone would rot the meat.

Like most of the genesis tales, they are fragments of old tales but transformed to show the powers of a god denying the freedoms of evolution. So if there was a God who created the world, the universe, whatever, it was Man who created the evils of gods that allowed kings to take the first and second freedoms from men. And the importance of the tale is an illustration that looking back is a preservative for going forward. The members of any community preserve the good of the community that they left and find another where human knowledge and culture and diversity necessary for survival transferred. Stone age didn’t become the iron age within a century or so just because there was a sudden magic brain meld around the globe (but not necessarily to every culture in the world)); agriculture (as we assume it) didn’t evolve around the globe because a bunch of wise (or power hungry men) in many areas of the globe just all of a sudden discovered grain farming was so labor intensive they could take over the people, and through them the resources that transformed the equality of equal power to authoritarian power.

In their book, Graeber & Wengrow point out how agriculture preceded kingdoms and in many cases, continued in some regions beyond the reach of kingdoms. Development of how to dehusk simple grasses and grind them into digestible foodstuffs obviously had to predate trying to harvest grains wouldn’t you think? You ain’t gonna farm what you don’t eat. Grains were probably, however, at first primarily dietary supplements that could be preserved for lean times when they might be gathered rather than farmed. Kind of puts to the rest the myth that mankind evolved in the savannahs because he was unable to hunt meat. At least I’ve never seen data that suggests our stomachs evolved so that earlier humans could digest unhusked grains, but I may be wrong. Certainly it may have altered prior to the evolution of sapiens, but I imagine finding methods to make it easier than encircling game and throwing stones at it would not have been necessary if the early people dwelling in the savannahs could have just survived on grass. For certain Homo heidelbergensis (homo ergaster as well if they were a separate species, but now generally assumed too genetically similar to be so distinguished) used spears. We have plenty of knowledge that homo erectus used stones, and some speculative that they probably had some type of throwing mechanism but no proof has arisen yet, to my knowledge,

Of course people migrated for trade and to exchange technology and to mate those not matrilineally related, and of course because they could no longer feel they could support the community they lived within.

Migration is only an issue when it is too massive and the migrants begin to replace the pre-existing natives or over-extend the environmental capacity and endanger survival. The Sioux had already migrated from the Mississippi Valley regions to the Minnesota long before any Europeans arrived, circa 800 A.D. Whether they migrated due to displacement or to simply not being able to continue within their original habitat due to environmental displacement, I am unclear; but there was conflict upon arrival and natives already in the region were chased from the vicinity. The Sioux transformed from a hunting and fishing community to an agricultural one by displacing and/or assimilating the existing natives, then as the white man began to displace easterly tribes westward, some of the Sioux (the Lakota tribes) began to migrate to the west. I may be be incorrect here, but I believe first into the eastern Kansas region where they tried to continue farming. Drought nearly wiped them out and then they discovered wild horses and migrated again and changed their culture once again became primarily a buffalo hunting people.

The Freedom To Change

The third freedom is the freedom to change and adapt to new cultures and new environments and the freedom to change one’s own cultural behavior, just illustrated by the Sioux.The adaptability of the human to his environment and the ability of human communities to do this is enabled primarily through the power of the individuals to have the equality necessarily to not follow and to migrate; whether the big man earned authority, or inherited authority, the authority they had was from respect, ritual, and accepting responsibility for the community. The community determined whether or not to follow the big man. Because any chief or big man had power only when it was agreed he should and any change in direction was agreed to by the community so any chief or big man desiring to stay in power obeyed the community because the community, or any part of the community could choose to follow the leader or not the leader. The Melanesian communities were extremely political, being the big man and attempting to gather friends and alliances to become the big man was frequently practiced. But to remain as big man he had to fulfill his role (and also to obtain his role) by giving what his own resources and the dealmaking to become were not about what he could obtain from his allies in contributions but how many of his allies would give what they had to gain new allies.

I am not well versed in pre-Caesar Roman history, but one illustration of the third freedom that the authors talk about, is from Roman History. They explain how human civilizations have changed their leadership and societal structure and readapt from top-down authoritarian leaders to (more) equitable power sharing was when they deposed (kind of by force, but not at first by killing him) and setting up their rotating consulship and a senate to debate the direction they wished to consensually agree upon taking.

The book explains towards its end that by reclaiming our three freedoms and refuting the errors of the technological progressive determinist historical dialogue as an incorrect (deliberately incorrect, in my opinion) idea of human evolution and growth we could survive amongst ourselves in more harmony. They don’t present a future blueprint because their is not really a blueprint other than that. But if we are free to redesign communities and the structures and practices of the community we are free to change those structures and practices as often as necessary but before we can grab hold the freedom to change we must first have the essential freedom of not having authorities deciding what we will do and what place in the society we may obtain.

That is the perplexing problem isn’t it. If it is to be done peacefully, if those who save democracy really wish to save democracy, isn’t the first step going to be their willingness to sacrifice their authority and return that authority to “WE THE PEOPLE” and not let it remain in the hands of “THEM THE MASTERS”.

No faction that I am aware in the republicans dueling banjos act of terror seems to not favor increasing their own authority over the We. But are they any democrats who recognize that the only way to save democracy is by continually updating it and to realize if they are to represent a constituency then they must represent the consensual desires of their communities and not the desires to force others “to let them do it” however they so wish.

Authority of any kind succeeds best when it washes the feet of others instead of demanding others wash their feet. A popular democracy will never be the will of the people. It is the consensus of the people that grants authority the right to have that authority.

Read the Dawn of Everything. It is a very long book; but it is a very contemporary book and it seems even his most severe critics have praised the detailed scholarship. So I suppose you should assume they are my knowledgeable than I.

Exceptions

This doesn’t mean I wholeheartedly follow or endorse every word of Dr. Graeber. He was, like his professor and mentor Marshall Sahlins (and co-authored Sahlins book On Kings.) and it was through that work that I first became aware of Mr. Graeber. I have been reading Sahlin’s work for well over fifty years, who was himself a pupil of Leslie White, who studied with Franz Boas who greatly influenced both Bronislaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict who taught Margaret Mead, whose Coming of Age in Samoa I first read when I was nine, the same year I read through the entire KJV and received a six volume set of supreme court decisions, concurrences, and dissents that began with with Marbury and ended with Smyth v.Ames from 1898. These three subjects became the first continuing passions of pursuing my thoughts about the world and I believe shape much of the direction of my inquiry into humanity and his relationship with the world. I suppose the combination of pursuing my reading in these fields leads to almost every perspective I propose.

Now if you have have any knowledge of the the anthropologists I mentioned above (and throw in Edward Morgan’s field observations of the Iroquois in the 19th century), they have all presented challenges to the western interpretation of historical progression and the ideology of what has become known as the European enlightenment. In other words they presented challenges that the concepts of hierarchies , authority, and the relationship of man to the king-god states that began to form in the late neolithic. They developed globally and the Dawn of Everything shows quite distinctively and in great detail how they parted ways with our evolutionary freedoms that turned into a bondage of obeisance to the king-god alliance. It is, the authors in this book propose, not a necessary alliance, and certainly not a progressive concept but a regression from nature. It occurred not because of man evolving in technological acumen, I believe that, and Graeber & Wengrow develop quite thoroughly that we would have developed technology on a similar (or perhaps) just as speedy of a track that it did, but it would not have produced the psychological harm that was caused by the control of the king-god relationship of controlling the people/resources. In other words, we could have developed technology that was environmentally less environmentally seditious. The technology that is presented to us binds us, rather than frees us, to its use often to a much greater degree of submission to the technology than is psychological beneficial. Our technological advancements often put us at its mercy rather and chattlelizes us beneath it by making us so utterly dependent to it we think we cannot possibly survive its absence. The automobile is a very useful tool. But the having of the private automobile forces us into needing the automobile. It is no longer always used as a tool that benefits, but too often becomes a necessity that controls us. Perhaps it is better said by a late 60’s song by Zager & Evans.

In the year 2525,
if man is still alive If woman can survive,
they may find
In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
n the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you
In the year 6565
You won't need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God's a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He'll look around Himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day
In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again
In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing
Now it's been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday.

Well we survived over a hundred thousand without kings and I sincerely doubt we will make it 10 thousand with kings, but the chronology of the dating in the song is in error , we must begin the 10,000 years not with the birth of Christ but with the birth of kings and we are rapidly approaching our 10,000 year limit. Both from an earthly evolutionary perspective, kingly rule (that has been supplanted by corporate industrial rule and now corporate technological rule, the concept that man is somehow capable of evoluting his own species has proven to be not only historically evidentiarily false, but it would be a failed species that could in no way be archaeologically discovered more than as a fragmentary species. But of course we have insured that if this planet ever has another species with the curiosity to discover we will be discovered and therein lies the problem.

But here is where I depart from Graber & Wengrow. The freedoms they mention are not freedoms that mean our natural state is one of anarchy. Rather they are the very freedoms necessary to create the necessary communal needs of reliance upon each other and were the hallmarks of the evolutionary success of our species. To inferior to survive on our own, we were totally dependent upon each other. But those same evolutionary weaknesses meant we needed to evolve with individuals that had strong individualistic traits and divergent strengths and our survival was as equally dependent upon the evolutionary development of dependence upon each other and independence from each other. We could have only successfully evolved with the freedom to disobey and the freedom to migrate because those very freedoms demanded our dependence upon each other to come together in dialogue. It is not that that we were anarchic at all—the freedoms were necessary to not be anarchic because they brought communities together through each individual’s strengths and these communities, far from being “simple” were often much more complex but the fabric was woven together through complex rituals that bound communities into working together and remain independently free to each to bring ideas to the table that gave us the opportunity for what they call the freedom to change. The freedom of the consensualism that the other freedoms granted to us as communities who had an individual equality of power that gave us the opportunity to be able to recognize our weaknesses and grow in our strengths and enable our continual ability to adapt to change through that very consensualism. While it seems contradictory to people who have been reared to view freedom as what is granted to us by the state, rather than freedom that creates a non-state community.

And so I disagree that the crisis we face with democracy is caused by some leanings towards fascism but is a desire for the consensual respect for the freedom to change as an expression of consensualism. And so anti-democratization is not a polar opposite to democracy but a natural revolution of the denied freedoms of an oligarchic-democracy that does not share its authority and denies the freedom to both object too or migrate from its authority. It other words it remains a conformist ideology to the institutions created in 1787 and denies the opportunity to continually update and change what was created some two hundred and forty odd years hence.

In 1956, Robert Dahl actually did something I am unaware of any other political theorist doing, he did fieldwork in an American community to determine how American democracy actually functioned. And he concluded that America was not a functioning democracy but functioned as a polyarchy, a system of ideological opponents that supplied oppositional voices but that those oppositional voices became the polyarchal authorities of control. Now Dahl suggests democracy cannot be achieved and so polyarchy is the most preferable form of government.

I disagree with Dahl as well. I think exposure to The Dawn of Everything might lead us to conclude that polyarchies still deny us our essential evolutionary freedoms. We tend to maintain the enlightenment conversion of medieval theologicalism of people being evil and therefore must submit to god to have societal order; into a chaos of societyless disorder that must have order imposed upon it. The Dawn ofEverything exposes the inerrancy of that belief, I believe, quite well. The issue that prevents our ability to change and creates instability is that imposition of order that denies the freedoms necessary for order to exist. It is the process that created the constitution, not the document itself, and the government, having seemingly brought the nation under bondage to the polyarchy that were themselves outgrowths of ideological differences of oligarchic masterships wanting, each, to maintain its masterships. So I think the polyarchial government is not the best we can achieve, but an imitation of what we could achieve were we granted our evolutionary freedoms rather than whatever rights we are permitted to have. As we have recently observed rights are what the governments permit, and those permits can be revoked And unless the Democratic portion of the polyarchy begins to dismantle its own power and the powers of the oligarchical support that permeates throughout the polyarchies the process of real freedom is denied.

The UnUtopian Optimist

Our Evolutionary Freedoms

My reflections on The Of The Dawn of Everything

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