Inevitable is much less fun than possible
Connor Halm
Why do middle school students learn about ancient history? For all the facts memorized about ancient Egypt, far fewer answers have been offered for why are we doing this? As a teacher starting a new job teaching ancient human history, I knew I needed to develop an answer to justify the coming days of instructions to students beyond “because I said so.” So when I saw a reading group at Night School Bar for The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, I signed up, to see whether they could help me understand what studying humanity’s ancient past could offer the next generation of students.
Graeber and Wengrow did not disappoint. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow ask readers to consider human history not as an inevitable march of progress towards modern civilization, private property, and inequality, but as a vast tapestry of contingent variety, every arrangement possible, none guaranteed. Graeber and Wengrow argue that human prehistory is full of evidence of diverse social arrangements. Human history, then, is a series of contingent possibilities, rather than an inevitable progression. Understanding the many possibilities of the past, one is more likely to be open to the many possibilities for the present and future - while avoiding human’s common pitfall: “It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable (Graeber and Wengrow, 206).”1
The authors argue that the conventional story of human history smacks of the inevitable. The story goes that humans started as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, living in small groups with nothing of much interest happening for most of 200,000 years. Then, agriculture and private property began, introduced the evils of hierarchy and ownership, and enabled the emergence of cities, population growth, and complex social organization, culminating in the present. Graeber and Wengrow accuse this story, originating around the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes2, of being wrong, boring, and carrying dire political implications for our present and future.
Graeber and Wengrow argue that the story implies an inevitable logic to the progress of human civilization which is supported by neither anthropology, history, nor archaeology. Humans did not live in simple hunter-gatherer bands where nothing much of interest happened for 200,000 years before cities. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow analyze different archaeological sites which show the vast diversity of forms of human organization across human history. Sites from the Ice Age and the Amazon suggest some humans had seasonal political arrangements which cycled on and off with the seasons, temporarily bestowing and removing power from individuals. Mounds of complicated construction found across the Americas suggest people’s knowledge of astronomy and their sharing of that knowledge and know-how across vast distances. People in the Amazon rain forest integrated small plots of farming with foraging. Not only were there vastly different arrangements of human society across the globe, but people would sometimes change their social arrangements. The conventional story of humans living in hunter-gatherer bands is wrong.
But it is also boring! Despite being a history teacher, I too had fallen prey to the silly idea that nothing much of interest had happened before writing. Not only do Graeber and Wengrow topple that belief, they demonstrate the implications of discounting the lives of so many human beings. That belief denies the humanity of people who lived before the invention of writing. Instead, it is shocking to consider the idea that all human beings who have lived since the species emerged around 200,000 years ago had consciousness, hopes, sadnesses, and relationships as complex as mine and yours. The conventional story, with its Garden of Eden framing, suggests that simple automatons – not fully formed human beings like you and me – ambled around aimlessly for 200,000 years.
The political implications of The Dawn of Everything most impacted my ideas about the value of learning ancient history. Graeber and Wengrow argue that if you believe the conventional story of human history, you see today’s society as more or less inevitable. Of course cities and technology and inequality arose. On the other hand, if you study the history of humanity and find the great variety of options humans have developed for their societies, you realize that the current state of affairs - both good and bad - arose historically, and are therefore contingent.
The best way to explain contingency is through its opposite, inevitability. If something is inevitable, it is bound to happen. There is no way around it, no way to change it, nothing to be done. In fact, trying to change the inevitable is absurd. But if something is contingent, it is the opposite of inevitable: it is possible, but not guaranteed. At the level of politics, contingency provides hope. Many people I know in liberal circles bemoan the state of the world and have a sense of hopelessness: the problems are intractable, and besides, what else is even possible? This is just the way the world is. Opening your eyes to the way the world came to be this way and not another helps you see that the world could be other ways if we made it so. The healthcare system in the United States, wealth inequality, our school system, driving on the right side of the road, the housing crisis, commercial agriculture, the Bill of Rights - all are one possibility among many.
Graeber and Wengrow helped me understand that those who study ancient history can access the sense of possibility in the ancient past. Prehistoric humans lived differently from us - and can remind us that there are manifold alternatives to our current ways of living. Hopefully, Graeber and Wengrow’s book will help students, young and old, see the contingency of human history, and the possibilities for our future.
1 Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2021.
2 Both of whom claimed they were not writing histories, but thought experiments about human social origins.
